God and Being

Lyons
This Element examines how the Western philosophical-

theological tradition between Plato and Aquinas understands
the relation between God and being. It gives a historical survey
of the two major positions in the period: (a) that the divine first
principle is “beyond being” (e.g. Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-
Dionysius), and (b) that the first principle is “being itself” (e.g. Religion and Monotheism
Augustine, Avicenna, and Aquinas). The Element argues that
we can recognise in the two traditions, despite their apparent
contradiction, complementary approaches to a shared project
of inquiry into transcendence.
God and Being

God and Being
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GOD AND BEING
Nathan Lyons
The University of Notre Dame Australia
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God and Being
Elements in Religion and Monotheism
DOI: 10.1017/9781009026413
First published online: December 2023
Nathan Lyons
The University of Notre Dame Australia
Author for correspondence: Nathan Lyons, nathan.lyons@nd.edu.au
Abstract: This Element examines how the Western

philosophical-theological tradition between Plato and Aquinas
understands the relation between God and being. It gives a historical
survey of the two major positions in the period: (a) that the divine first
principle is “beyond being” (e.g. Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius),
and (b) that the first principle is “being itself” (e.g. Augustine, Avicenna, and
Aquinas). The Element argues that we can recognise in the two traditions,
despite their apparent contradiction, complementary approaches to
a shared project of inquiry into transcendence.
Keywords: Platonism, theological ontology, being, Plato, Aquinas
© Nathan Lyons 2023

ISBNs: 9781009462518 (HB), 9781009012768 (PB), 9781009026413 (OC)
ISSNs: 2631-3014 (online), 2631-3006 (print)
Contents
Introduction 1
1 The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition 3
2 The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition 19
3 Reconciling the Traditions? 45
4 God and Being Today 50
Conclusion 52
References 53
God and Being 1
There is much to say which is hard to perceive about being . . . We would have to
discover whether God transcends being . . . or whether He is Himself being.
– Origen, Contra Celsum VI.64
Introduction
Imagine you have a box containing everything that exists – every rock and tree,
every subatomic particle, every person and every galaxy, and every desk chair.
If there is more than one universe, all the universes go in the box. If there are
immaterial beings such as angels, they go in the box too. Past and future things?
In they go. Imagine it is all in your box of being. Now, let us ask a tricky
question. Let us assume that the things in the box of being must have been
brought into existence by something – we can call this thing the ‘origin of
being’. Does the origin of being lie inside or outside your box of existing things?
The question forces us into a dilemma. If we say that the origin of being is
outside the box, this means that the cause of existence does not itself exist since
we stipulated that all existing things are inside the box of being. But a non-
existing cause of existence sounds absurd – it might even sound worse than the
problem it is supposed to solve. If we say that the origin of being is inside the
box, we have a different challenge. This position gets us an existing first cause,
but if the origin is another thing in the box of being, like a chair or a galaxy, then
how can it serve as the cause of all these existing things? An in-the-box origin
does not solve our problem because we are seeking a causal explanation for all
beings in the box, and if the origin is itself one of these beings, then it seems to
be just another instance of the question, not a solution to it.
I like to use this thought experiment in my medieval philosophy classes to
introduce students to some of the metaphysical puzzles implicit in the idea of

transcendence, which is central in so much religious and philosophical thinking in
the ancient and medieval period. In particular, this question about the box of being
pushes students into one of the perennial difficulties that the Greek philosophical
tradition and the Abrahamic religious traditions all grapple with in their own
ways: how is the first principle – whether we call it the Good, the One, the First
Mover, or God – related to being? This question is the topic of this Element.
We will consider the two leading answers given to this God–being question
in Western intellectual traditions during the ancient and medieval periods. The
first position is that the first principle is ‘beyond being’ (BB for short), which
is famously articulated by Plato and later Platonists such as Plotinus.
The second position is that the first principle is ‘being itself’ (BI for short),
commonly associated with theologians such as Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas. In terms of our imagined box of being, BB positions correspond to
an origin of being that is ‘out of the box’. As we will see, BI positions are more
2 Religion and Monotheism
difficult to map on to the thought experiment, with a great deal hanging on the
details of how the box of being is characterised.
The scope of this Element is limited to Western traditions of philosophy and
theology, though with ‘Western’ understood expansively to include sources
from the Arabic-Islamic world, along with the Greek pagan,1 Jewish, and
Christian traditions. Our period goes roughly from Plato (c. 429–347 BCE) to
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). I deliberately end our study at this point to
dodge Duns Scotus (1265–1308), whose ‘univocity of being’ doctrine sets
a new course for the God–being question and arguably precipitates transform-
ations in subsequent ontological theories that are too complex to address in
a study of this size (Boulnois 1999). Our Western focus precludes other tradi-
tions that treat comparable themes regarding first principles and being – a larger
study might fruitfully compare the Western sources in this study with Hindu
Vedanta, Mahāyāna Buddhism, or Confucianism.
In focusing on the core BB and BI positions of premodern Western thought,
we will pass over philosophies that propose a first principle that is ‘in the box’ of
being. An obvious instance is the ancient materialists, who posit some physical
entity (water, atoms, etc.) as arche. Another example is theisms that locate God
‘in the box’, so that God counts as a ‘being among beings’. Such in-the-box
theisms were rare in the premodern period – the Stoic god–logos is probably an
instance,2 and (as we will see) Aristotle’s prime mover is possibly another – but
they are more common in later Western intellectual history.
Our inquiry will proceed in four parts:
1. The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition

2. The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition

3. Reconciling the Traditions?
4. God and Being Today
Sections 1 and 2 will offer a loosely chronological, selective survey of BB and

BI thinkers in our period. My goal in selecting historical sources has been to
illustrate the intellectual development of the traditions over time, with more
attention given to more influential sources. Section 3 will consider whether and
how the two traditions can be reconciled, given the apparent contradiction
between their basic claims. Section 4 will briefly suggest some ways that the
findings of our study can inform contemporary philosophy of religion.
1
For want of a better word, I use the term ‘pagan’ in this study for non-Abrahamic philosophers,
acknowledging that the term originates in patristic Christian polemics, not the self-understandings of
the philosophers themselves.
2
See, for example, Alexander of Aphrodisias, De fato XXII.
God and Being 3
This structure, which divides BB and BI into two separate ‘traditions’, is

inevitably misleading. For better or worse, I place all our historical sources into
one or the other tradition, though many sources are ambiguous and reasonable
cases could be made for switching some of my decisions. Nevertheless, I think
that distinguishing two traditions in this way offers a useful heuristic for
interpreting the intellectual history and for clarifying the conceptual issues
that are in play. Ultimately, I will argue in Section 3 that BB and BI are
complementary ways of articulating transcendence and that there is, in fact,
no profound contradiction between the two approaches. The dual structure of
this Element will therefore be qualified by the conclusions we draw.
In attempting to cover this wide period of intellectual history, a study of this
length will inevitably pass over many complexities in the sources and interpret-
ive debates in current scholarship. This necessity is unfortunate, especially
because the God–being question in our period is so complicated and subtle.
The sheer variety of ‘being’ terminologies we will encounter indicates this:
Greek (ousia, ontos, and einai), Hebrew (hayah), Arabic (mawjud, wujud, and
anniyya), Latin (ens, essentia, substantia, and esse), and even a little Coptic
(shoop) and Middle English (beyng). Nevertheless, my hope is that the selective
historical surveys presented here will be sufficient to provide an illuminating
picture of the development of BB and BI thinking across our period.
One final methodological note before we begin: my working assumption is
that, despite their obvious differences, the pagan philosophers and Abrahamic
theologians who we consider are pursuing a common intellectual project of
conceptualising transcendence, so that the God of the philosophers and the God
of Abraham are more or less one and the same, at least according to the self-
understandings of the majority of our historical protagonists. I will not try to
defend this view historically or conceptually here, though others have.3 Even with
the many disagreements between pagan and Abrahamic traditions and between
the Abrahamic traditions themselves, in my view, there is sufficient commonality
for them to be meaningfully treated together in a study of this kind.
1 The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition

The first of our two God–being traditions claims that the first principle is ‘beyond
being’. Its leading light is Plato and it is classically expressed in the pagan
Neoplatonist tradition, though its influence is present in all the Abrahamic traditions.
3
See, for example, Louth (2007), Marenbon (2006, 1–6), Fraenkel (2015), and Goodman (2012).
Compare Hampton and Kenney (2020, 4–5): ‘Platonism . . . initiated and sustained a philosophical
and theological culture of transcendentalism, centred on the Good or the One. It was this transcen-
dentalism that served as a powerful resource for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers, generating
a distinctive trajectory of thought through its reception into the Abrahamic traditions’.
Plato
The locus classicus for BB thinking is Plato’s discussion of the Good in
Republic 509b.4 In this passage, Socrates is conversing with Glaucon and
illustrates his understanding of the Good by a comparison with the sun:
S: You’ll be willing to say, I think, that the sun not only provides visible
things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, growth,
and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.
G: How could it be?
S: Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of
knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is
also due to it, although the good is not being [ouk ousias], but
superior to it [epekeina tēs ousias] in rank and power.
And Glaucon comically said: By Apollo, what a daemonic superiority!

(509b-c)5
As the sun gives light and life to all living things, so Socrates’ comparison
suggests: the Good gives intelligibility and existence to all beings. As the sun
gives growth and change in natural things without itself counting as a changing
thing, so the Good gives being to things without itself counting as being or
a being – it lies somehow beyond being.
Like all great texts in the history of philosophy – and this is one of the
greatest – the interpretation of this passage is highly contested.6 One possible
reading goes like this. In this passage, Socrates serves as a reliable mouthpiece
for Plato’s own metaphysical views. Here in the Republic, Plato construes the
world of material things as the realm of becoming (gignomenou), which is
contrasted with the realm of being (to on) (521d), where lie the eternal forms
or ideas of material things. This Platonic structure inherits and adapts the
foundational Parmenidean-Eleatic notion of being (on) as intelligible, change-
less, eternal, and one.7 In the realm of being, there is ‘a single form [idean] of
each’ – Plato refers here to the examples of beauty, good, and ‘all the things’
that are many – and we call this form ‘the being [estin] of each’ (507b). The
Good, however, is a special case. It is not just another form, like other forms in
the realm of being. The Good is source of the truth (alētheia) and being (on)
4
In addition to the Republic and Parmenides texts discussed here, other relevant material in Plato
includes Sophist 242b-251a, Philebus 23c-26d, and Timaeus 28a-29b.
5
Trans. (Plato 1992).
6
For some past and present interpretations, see Baltes (1997), Krämer (2012), and Whittaker
(1969).
7
See Graham (2010, 1:203–44). Indeed, this Parmenidean idea is echoed in one way or another in
most historical sources in this study.
God and Being 5
enjoyed by all the forms, as the sun is the source of light for physical objects
(508d). Therefore, as the source of being, the Good necessarily transcends
both the realm of material becoming and the realm of intellectual being – it is
not being (ouk ousias) but beyond being (epekeina tēs ousias). In this passage,
Plato gives his account of his first principle: the Good is the extra-ontological
first cause, on which all beings depend for their existence.
This brief exposition reflects a traditional interpretation of the Republic 509b
passage and, while it requires detailed defence against many rival readings
today,8 interpretations along these metaphysical lines were the basis of the text’s
profound significance in the later BB tradition, especially for the Neoplatonists
of the third century onwards.
A second important Platonic source for the BB tradition is the so-called
hypotheses of the Parmenides. This notoriously difficult dialogue explores
puzzles related to the theory of forms and the first principle, described here as
‘the One’. In the especially enigmatic second part of the text (137c-166c), the
character, Parmenides, probes the ontological status of the One by raising and
testing various hypotheses about it. As an initial hypothesis (137c-142a), he
considers implications that seem to follow from affirming that ‘the one is’, that
is, affirming that the One exists. These include that the One has no parts, limit,
or shape and that it lies outside of time, and so on. These arguments drive to the
conclusion that the One in fact is not:
Therefore the one in no way partakes of being [ousias] . . . the one in no way is
[esti] . . . neither is it in such a way as to be one, because it would then, by
being and partaking of being, be [on kai ousias metechon]. But, as it seems,
the one neither is one nor is [estin] . . . no name belongs to it, nor is there an
account or any knowledge or perception or opinion of it. (141e-142a)9
Parmenides’ second hypothesis (142b-155e) retraces the same question (‘If the
one is . . . ‘) but now argues to apparently opposite conclusions. If the One is,
then it must be (among other things) whole and infinitely many and have
a shape, location, and temporality. The hypothesis concludes that the One
must indeed exist in some sense:
If one is [estin], can it be, but not partake of being [ousias]? – It cannot. – So
there would also be the being of the one, and that is not the same as the one.
For if it were, it couldn’t be the being of the one, nor could the one partake of
it . . . Because ‘is’ signifies something other than ‘one’ . . . So whenever
8
Interpretations akin to this are defended in, for instance, Ferber and Damschen (2015) and Gerson
(2020b, 120–93).
9
Trans. (Plato 1996).
someone, being brief, says ‘one is’, [estin] would this simply mean that the
one partakes of being [ousias]? (142b-142c)
Therefore, the one was and is [estin] and will be, and was coming to be and
comes to be and will come to be . . . And indeed there would be knowledge
and opinion and perception of it. (155d)
Again, many interpretations of these difficult passage have been proposed

(Peterson 2019; Turner and Corrigan 2011a, 2011b), and it is certainly beyond
our scope to adjudicate them here. In terms of our box of being, Plato’s recondite
arguments here can plausibly be read in support of a principle (or principles) either
in or out of the box, neither, or both. All these possibilities regarding the being/non-
being of the One are investigated in the intricate debate that the Parmenides
precipitates in the Platonist tradition – indeed, these Parmenides hypotheses are
‘so important for subsequent Platonism that this Platonism could not be defined
without it’ (Corrigan 2011). A key step in this tradition of debate is an identification
of the two principles described in our texts – the Republic’s Good and
Parmenides’ – so that the terms can serve as synonymous names for the Platonist
first principle.10 It is not difficult to see why the two texts are linked by readers in
this way: the being/non-being of the Parmenides’ One seems to point to the same
peculiar ontological status indicated by the epekeina of the Republic’s Good.
The Platonists
A first principle ‘beyond being’ becomes a leading theme in much of the Platonist
tradition after Plato. As we will see, the great exemplar in this respect is Plotinus.
However, before Plotinus, there are some important figures to note. The first is
Plato’s nephew and immediate successor as head of the Academy, Speusippus

(408–339 BCE). Aristotle reports that Speusippus believed ‘the one itself is not
even an existing thing [on ti einai]’ (Meta. 1092a) and Proclus reports that he
believed ‘the One is higher than being and is the source of being’ (In Parm. VII,
40 K).11 These and other fragments are complicated to interpret, but they seem
sufficient to locate Speusippus in the BB tradition.12 After Speusippus, BB thinking
‘goes underground’ for three centuries,13 re-emerging in Middle Platonists and
10
Gerson (2020a). There is an old but contested tradition that Plato himself identified the Good and
the One – agathon estin hen – in a public lecture titled ‘On the Good’, which was received with
perplexity or ridicule by its audience (Gaiser 1980). Separate from the more controversial
‘unwritten doctrines’, there is arguably evidence of the identification in the extant dialogues
(Desjardins 2003, 105–12).
11 12
Trans. (Proclus 1992). Dillon (2003, 40–88); Tarán (2016, 86–107).
13
Carabine (1992b, 45). ‘The period of Platonic development from Xenocrates [396–314 BCE]
right down to Antiochus of Ascalon [125–68 BCE], has little to offer to the development of the
idea of the divine transcendent One, apart from the contribution of Speusippus’ (37).
God and Being 7
Neopythagoreans, beginning in the first-century BCE. Among these, we note

Eudorus (first-century BCE), who held that the One is the supreme God (ton
huperanô theon) and principle (arche) of all things, and Moderatus (first-century
CE), who holds that ‘the first One above Being [einai] and all substance . . .
the second One, which is what really is [ontos on] and is intelligible, is the Forms’.14
Turning now to Plotinus (204–270), we meet the leading Neoplatonist and
probably the leading exponent of ‘beyond being’ thinking in our period. Plato
states only once that the Good is specifically epekeina ousias (Rep. 509b), but
Plotinus takes the remark as the core of his entire metaphysical system. ‘While the
One is, in truth, ineffable’, according to Plotinus, the Republic designation is the
single appropriate way to speak of it: ‘to say “transcends all things and transcends
the majesty of Intellect” is, among all other ways of speaking of it, the only true
one . . . because it indicates that it is not “something” among all things’ (V.3.13).
He explores the BB status of the first principle – which he variously refers to as
the One, the Good, and the God – frequently in his Enneads.15 He emphasises that
the One must be construed as beyond being because it transcends the particularity
of existing things and ideas, possessing no ‘form’ that would make it a specific
‘this’. The One is not limited to a particular way or kind of being but exceeds the
whole array of forms that being may take:
Since the Substantiality that is generated is form . . . the One is necessarily

formless. For Substance [ousian] must be a ‘this something’, and this is
defined. But it is not possible to grasp the One as a ‘this’. For in that case,
it would no longer be a principle, but only that thing which you said was
a ‘this’. But if all things are found within that which is generated, which
among these will you say that the One is? Since it is no one of these, it can
only be said to transcend them. These are Beings, that is, Being. It, therefore,
transcends Being [epekeina ara ontos]. (Enn. V.5.6)16
Because the One is beyond being, it is also beyond intellect, in the senses of both
creaturely intelligence and the transcendent hypostasis of Intellect: ‘the One is
not Intellect, but prior to it. For Intellect is something, whereas the One is not
something, because it is prior to every Being, since it is not Being’ (Enn.
VI.9.3). This view is a corollary of Plotinus’ conviction, shared with many
thinkers in our period, that being and knowledge are coterminous, so that all that
exists is knowable, and vice versa.
Plotinus is notable in the BB tradition for making an unambiguous assertion
of the first principle’s transcendence above being and intellect. As we will see,
BB theorists are not always so straightforward. The pagan Neoplatonist
14
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, I.5.181 and I.7.230, trans. (Simplicius 2012).
15 16
See esp. Enn. V.1, V.4–5, VI.7. Trans. (Plotinus 2017).
tradition that follows Plotinus often take his unqualified BB position as a litmus
test for true Platonism and, therefore, for true philosophy.
Plotinus’ student, Porphyry (c. 234–305), speaks in some places in good
Plotinian fashion of a principle beyond being. The first principle contains all
things ‘in the Beyond [epekeina], non-intellectually and supra-essentially
[huperousios]’ (Sent. 10).17 The One is ‘that which is beyond Intellect [epekeina
tou nou]’ (Sent. 25). He even refers to the One as a non-being (mē on) beyond
being (huper to on) (Sent. 26). These BB-style remarks, however, must be set
alongside hostile reports from later Neoplatonists that Porphyry, abandoning
authentic Plotinianism, identified his first principle as ‘the summit of the
intelligible world’ (Proclus, In Parm. 1070) or ‘the Father of the intelligible
triad’ (Damascius, De prin. VII.43).18 These reports allege that Porphyry’s first
principle is, in fact, Being, which is the first of three elements in the
Neoplatonist ‘intelligible realm’ (i.e. the Being–Life–Intellect triad). This
apparently non-Plotinian, BI-style view of Porphyry is significantly strength-
ened if one accepts, as some do, the Porphyrian authorship of the Anonymous
Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, which we will discuss in our BI survey.
Considering only his generally accepted texts, Porphyry is ambiguous.
Later Neoplatonists endorse Plotinus’ BB position. Iamblichus (c. 242–325)
contrasts ‘the good that is beyond being [epekeina tēs ousias]’ with ‘that which
exists on the level of being’ (De mysteriis I.5).19 Proclus (412–485) agrees that
‘the good is, as we say, beyond being and is the source of beings’ and argues that
‘the good is better than absolute being’ (De malo. 2).20 Damascius (c. 480–550)
observes that because ‘it is altogether impossible to conceive of anything
simpler than the One’, we must conclude that ‘in every way . . . the One is
before Being’ (De prin. II.21).

However, later Neoplatonists also complicate the Plotinian account of the One,
in an effort to explain more convincingly how the single principle is related to the
multiplicity of beings that flow from it, they present various depictions of a ‘realm
of the One’ emerge,21 often populated by multiple principles beyond being.
Iamblichus proposes a hierarchy of (a) the Ineffable (pantelōs arrheton), (b) the
transcendent One-beyond-the-One, (c) the One, which is ‘one simply’ (ho haplos
hen) and contains all beings ‘in a hidden mode’, and (d) the principles of Limited
and the Unlimited, with the whole structure located beyond being.22 Damascius
similarly contrasts the highest Ineffable, to which no attributes can be affirmed or
17 18 19
Trans. (Porphyry 2005). Trans. (Damascius 2009). Trans. (Iamblichus 2003).
20
Trans. (Proclus 2014).
21
This is Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s useful analytical term in Damascius (2009).
22
As reported in Damascius De prin. VII.43, VIII.50–51, and Proclus In Parm. 1066 and In Tim. I.78. In
Iamblichus’ system, the highest principle within being is a third One – the One-Existent (to hen on).
God and Being 9
denied, with a One, which ‘is the principle of all things’ and is identified with the
principle Plato describes as the Good or One beyond being (De prin. I.1–8; II.22).
Syrianus (d. 437), the teacher of Proclus, similarly proposed that ‘beyond the One
there will be a unique principle, the Ineffable’ (Damascius, De prin. IV.10). A key
issue in these intra-Neoplatonist debates is the interpretation of Parmenides
hypotheses discussed earlier.
Yet, more complexity emerges in the realm of the One with the doctrine of
henads. Beneath or around the hen (the One), we find henads (unities), which
Proclus also describes as ‘gods’ (theoi).23 The henads are like the One in every
way except that they are ‘participated’ – that is, lower beings can share in their
qualities – while the One is strictly unparticipated (El. Th. prop. 116).24
However, like the One, the henads are beyond being: ‘if the First Principle
transcend Being, then since every god [i.e. every henad], qua god, is of the order
of that Principle, it follows that all of them must transcend Being [huperousios]’
(El. Th. prop. 115).
There are occasionally instances of Latin BB thinking outside or adjacent to
the mainstream Latin Christian tradition (Gersh 1986, 419–646). One is
Calcidius (fourth century), who describes his first principle as ‘the highest
God, who is the supreme Good, beyond all substance [ultra omnem substan-
tiam] and all nature’ (In Tim. 176),25 likely echoing the Republic text.26
From Good to God

Before moving to the Abrahamic traditions, we must note how the talk about the
Good and One in pagan Platonists is related to theological talk about God/s.
Theological (theos) language is present in virtually all Greek discussions of first

principles, from the Presocratics forward (Drozdek 2016). Theological talk is
everywhere in the Platonist tradition. Xenocrates (339–314 BCE) in the Old
Academy describes the One as ‘first God’ (fr. 213).27 All Middle Platonists see
their primary principle as a god, and most see it as a divine intellect in which the
Platonic forms are contained or produced (Boys-Stones 2017, 147–83). Plotinus
describes the One in theological terms with some frequency (Rist 1962). The
theological dimension is especially obvious in the later Neoplatonists. Proclus
argues that ‘God and One are the same because there is nothing greater than God
and nothing greater than the One’ (In Parm. I.641). In a particularly illuminating
23
See, for exampe, Proclus, El. Th. props. 113–27. The term henads has an earlier history – for
example, Plato, Philebus 15a; Plotinus, Enn. VI.6.
24 25
Trans. (Proclus 1963). Trans. (Calcidius 2016).
26
Though there are ambiguities regarding the ontological status of Calcidius’ first God – see
Reydams-Schils (2020, 88–96).
27
See Gerson (2008, 96–7).
sentence, he identifies One, Good, and God beyond being: ‘that the One [hen] is
God [theos] follows from its identity with the Good [agathon]: for the Good is
identical with God, God being that which is beyond [epekeina] all things’ (El. Th.
prop. 113). Additionally, the Neoplatonist tradition increasingly pursues religious
and liturgical practices, particularly the ritual theurgy recommended by
Iamblichus and Proclus (Addey 2016).
The free movement between philosophical and theological vocabularies (if it
makes sense to distinguish these at all) in Platonist metaphysical speculation
supports the view that pagan and Abrahamic thinkers in our period are engaged
in a common intellectual inquiry into transcendence. It is no great novelty for
the Abrahamic theologians to identify the one Good with the one God because
the basic link is already present in the Platonist tradition.
The Abrahamic Traditions

Eastern Christians
The Platonist ‘beyond being’ tradition is embraced by many theologians in the
Greek Eastern Christian tradition. The formative figure is Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite (c. fifth–sixth century). Under the influence especially of Proclus,
Dionysius constantly refers to the Christian God as ‘beyond being’. The task of
theology is to deal ‘with what is beyond being [huperousiois]’ (Div. nom.
641D).28 God is ‘the supra-being beyond every being [huperousios apases
ousias]’ (648C). The Trinity is the ‘divine unity beyond being’, enjoying
a ‘supra-essential subsistence [huperousios huparxis]’ (641A). God’s tran-
scendence of being goes together with a strict apophatic transcendence of
language and knowledge:
[He] transcends [huper] mind and being [ousian]. He is completely unknown

and non-existent [mēde einai]. He exists beyond being [estin huperousios]
and he is known beyond [huper] the mind. (Epist. 1)29
[T]he unknowing of what is beyond being [huperousiotetos] is something

above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself . . . [B]eings are surpassed by
the infinity beyond being [huperousios apeiria], intelligences by that oneness
which is beyond intelligence. (Div. nom. 588A-B)
These BB commitments are confirmed in Dionysius’ recognition of Good as the

highest divine name, in keeping with the Platonists: ‘the sacred writers have
pre-eminently set apart [Good] for the supra-divine God from all other names’
(693B).
28 29
Trans. (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987). Trans. (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987).
God and Being 11
Yet, alongside these many BB descriptions of God as an extra-ontological

principle, Dionysius expounds with approbation the divine name of ‘Being’,
which appears second only to ‘Good’ (816A-825C). Alluding to Exodus 3:14,
he instructs his readers to celebrate ‘the name of “being” which is rightly
applied by theology to him who truly is’ (816B). Further, he argues that God
possesses ‘preexistence’ (proeinai) (820B) and that God has an ‘existence’
above being (huperousios einai) (824A). The Good ‘is’ beyond being (to
ontos huperousio) (687A) and God ‘is the essence of being [to einai] for the
things which have being [onta]’ (817D).
Yet again, however, all of this is apparently exceeded by his view that God
transcends being and non-being. Dionysius appears in places to identify God with
non-being, for example, ‘nothing is completely a non-being [mē on], unless it is
said to be in the Good in the sense of beyond-being [huperouison]’ (716D).
Elsewhere, he elevates God above the non-being/being contrast: God is ‘absolute
goodness, surpassing the things that are and the things that are not’ (736B). The
name Good ‘extends to beings and non-beings and that Cause is superior [huper]
to being and nonbeings’ (816B). The implication seems to be that the transcend-
ence of the Good is so great as to include the plenitude of being itself, yet also to
exceed it and capture too the non-existent and not-yet-existent.
What should we make of this ‘untidiness . . . or, perhaps, paradox’ (Louth
2001, 87) in Dionysius regarding BB and BI? In my view, he is best read as
finally a BB thinker. As several scholars emphasise, Dionysius’ Neoplatonist
view of being as intelligible and finite means that Dionysius’ infinite God must
finally exceed being and his positive ascriptions of being should be seen as
recognitions that God pre-contains being as its cause (O’Rourke 1992, 65–84;
Perl 2007, 5–34).30
In part because of his assumed status as an apostolic figure, Dionysius is
enormously influential in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions – as
Palamas remarks, Dionysius is ‘the most prominent of theologians next to the
divine apostles’ (Capita 85)31 – and all major Eastern theologians respond in
some way to Dionysius’ doctrine of God beyond being. Maximus the Confessor
(c. 580–662) is a good example. ‘God’, writes Maximus, ‘is simply and
indefinably beyond all beings [huper panta ta onta] . . . beyond reason and
knowledge and any kind of relationship whatever’ (Ambigua 10, 1153B).32 He
30
O’Rourke (1992, 202): ‘expressing the ontological transcendence of the Thearchy with such
phrases as ontos proon or on estin huperousios, Dionysius is relying upon entitative words and
concepts to express the immeasurable distance between the finite and infinite . . . ontos is used to
convey the supra-existential excellence of the Good but is itself proper to existence, which,
according to Dionysius, is necessarily finite’. We will return to the theme of infinite being in the
following.
31 32
Trans. (Palamas 1988). Trans. (Louth 1996).
explains: ‘being [einai] is derived from [God], but he is not being [einai]. For he
is beyond being itself [einai]’ (1180D). Yet, like Dionysius, Maximus still
speaks in ontological terms about God, variously attributing ‘being itself’
(auto to einai, autoousia) and ‘beingness’ (ontotes) to God (Perl 1991, 114).
He argues that ‘God always properly is, one and alone by nature, comprehend-
ing in himself all proper being [kurios einai] in every way, as being above
proper being itself’ (Capita theo. eco. 1084C).33 In an important and delicate
passage, Maximus explains that God’s peculiar ontological status means that
being and non-being are both fittingly applied, though under apophatic
constraints:
[God] can in no way be associated by nature with any being and thus
because of his superbeing [huperontos] is more fittingly referred to as
nonbeing . . . In fact both names, being [to einai] and nonbeing [to mē
einai], are to be reverently applied to him although not at all properly. In
one sense they are both proper to him, one affirming the being of God as
cause of beings, the other completely denying in him the being which all
beings have, based on his preeminence as cause. On the other hand, neither
is proper to him because neither represents in any way an affirmation of the
essence of the being under discussion as to its substance or nature . . . He has
in fact a simple existence [huparxin], unknowable and inaccessible to all
and altogether beyond understanding which transcends all affirmation and
negation. (Mystagogia proem 664AC)34
John Damascene (c. 676–749), apparently departing from Dionysius, gives

pride of place to ‘being’ as a divine name: ‘of all the names given to God the
more proper is that of He Who Is [ho on] . . . for like some limitless and
boundless sea of essence [ousias apeiron], He contains all being in Himself’

(De fide I.9).35 However, this sits alongside Dionysian BB claims – indeed, he
immediately follows this sentence with: ‘but as St. Dionysius says, He is The
Good, for in God one may not say that the being comes first and then the good
afterwards’. God, he explains, ‘transcends [huper] all beings [onta] and being
itself [autode to einai on]’ (De fide I.4). He is ‘superessential [huperousion] and
unnameable’; so the most satisfactory way to refer to his being is ‘superessential
essence [huperousion ousia]’ (De fide I.12).
In the fourteenth century, Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1357) expressed similar
BB convictions. God ‘is not a being [on estin] . . . he is not being [on] because he is
beyond all beings [huper panta ta onta]’ (Capita 78). And elsewhere: ‘we say that
that God is not being, for we believe Him to be above being’ (Triads II.iii.8).36
While Palamas does use the language of ousia in theological argument, he clarifies
33 34 35
Trans. (Perl 1991, 114). Trans. (Berthold 1985). Trans. (Damascene 1958).
36
Trans. (Palamas 1983).
God and Being 13
that, properly speaking, God is ‘superessential’ (huperousios), an ‘essence beyond

essence’ (ousia huperousios).37 He explains that ‘the superessential . . . is the
reality which possesses [divine] powers and gathers them into unity in itself’
(Triads III.i.23). He thus locates God as beyond beings ‘in a superessential
[huperousios] way’ (Triads I.iii.8) and argues, stretching his Dionysian termin-
ology, that God ‘possesses the superessential superessentially’ (Triads III.iii.14).
Western Christians
BB positions are rare in the Western Latin tradition. John Scottus Eriugena
(815–877), however, is an outstanding counterexample. With facility in Greek,
he engages closely with Maximus and Dionysius, whom he sees as ‘the highest
theologian’ (Periphyseon III 644b),38 and develops a remarkable Latin rendi-
tion of BB in the wake of these Eastern theologians. ‘The ineffable Nature’, he
writes, ‘is not called Essence properly, yet it is properly called superessential
[superessentialis]’ (I 460c). God is ‘the Goodness beyond being [superessen-
tialis bonitas]’ (III 619c), and he ‘alone properly subsists above being itself
[super ipsum esse]’ (I 481c). Like many BB theologians, Eriugena still uses BI
language. The origin of things ‘is Being itself [ipsum esse], which indeed is
God, Who gives both being [esse] (as a natural gift) and wellbeing (as a grace)’
(I 515b). And ‘when we say that God is [esse], we do not say that He is after
some manner . . . we use the words is [est] and was [erat] in Him simply and
infinitely and absolutely’ (I 482a). Nevertheless, these attributions of divine
being must be interpreted in light of, and probably subordinated to, Eriugena’s
attributions of ‘non-being’ or ‘nothingness’ to God, which he argues indicate
excellence, not privation:
[S]o long as it is understood to be incomprehensible by reason of its tran-

scendence it is not unreasonably called ‘Nothing’ [nihilum] . . . the Divine
Goodness [is] called ‘Nothing’ for the reason that, beyond all things that are
and that are not, it is found in no essence (III 680d-681c)
or:
[W]hen we predicate being of Him we do not say that He is [non dicimus

ipsum esse]; for being is from Him but He is not Himself being [non ipsum
esse]. For above this being after some manner there is More-than-being
[superesse]. (I 482b)
Indeed, some interpreters suggest that, on balance, Eriugena’s theological

ontology is better described as a ‘negative ontology’ or meontology, which
37 38
Pino (2022, 50–5). Trans. (Sheldon-Williams 1968).
‘can be read as an alternative to a metaphysics based on Exodus 3:14’ (Carabine

2000, 41; Moran 2004, 92–102). The Latin tradition will not see anything quite
like this bold expression of BB thinking again until Meister Eckhart in the
thirteenth century.
Jews and Muslims
As in the Latin Christian tradition, the majority of the Jewish and Islamic
medieval thinkers fall on the side of BI. In the Jewish tradition, BB thinking
is relatively rare.39 One instance may be the medieval Kabbalists, who describe
the divine principle as Ein-Sof (infinite) and occasionally attribute to it yitron
(superfluity), a term which Gershom Scholem suggests in his classic study is
‘apparently as a translation of the neoplatonic term hyperousia’ (Scholem 1974,
89). If we are willing to count them in the Jewish tradition, an earlier instance
may be the Sethian Gnostics (second–third century). One typical Sethian text
says of ‘the pure One’ that it ‘is not anything among existing things, but rather
something superior to these – not “superior” in the comparative sense, but in the
absolute sense’.40
In the Islamic-Arabic tradition, there are some Neoplatonist-influenced
streams that hold explicitly to a BB position (Kars 2019; Morewedge 1992).
An early instance is Jahm bin Safwan (696–745), who argued that God is not ‘a
being [say’] since a being is something created’ and ‘this would be to make Him
similar to beings [‘asya’]’. While God is ‘not a being . . . neither is He a non-
being [la say’] because He is the Creator of all beings so there is no being which
is not a creature’.41
A more sustained Islamic BB stream is the tenth–eleventh century tradition of

Neoplatonic Isma’ili thinkers. Al-Sijistani (c. 930–971) is a leading figure, who
writes: ‘the word Allah has two syllables and likewise exaltation is of two kinds:
exaltation above beingness [al-aysiya] and exaltation above nonbeingness [al-
laysiya]’ (Kitab al Yanabi sec. 111).42 Even the transcendent principle of
intellect, the ‘Preceder’, defers to Allah’s extra-ontological transcendence: the
Preceder ‘sees that the greatness of its Originator is something it does not have
the ability to grasp and thus it must exalt Him above every being and nonbeing’
(sec. 110). Similarly, Nasir Khusrav (1004–1088) argues that, while the Intellect
39
Sarah Pessin (2003) makes a compelling case for continuities between Plotinus’ and Ibn
Gabirol’s first principle, but I think Gabirol is still better situated in the BI tradition, as I will
argue in the next section).
40
Apocryphon of John, Berlin Codex 24–5, trans. (Turner 2001, 503). The Sethian Gnostic texts
are complex to interpret and I discuss them again in the BI tradition in the following.
41
These quotations are from later reports in Ibn Hanbal and others, all translated in Frank (2005).
42
Trans. (Al-Sijistānī 1994).
God and Being 15
(Aql) is ‘the First Existent’, God himself ‘is beyond being or not-being’ (Shish
Fasl chap. 1 and 2).43 This Isma’ili BB view was fiercely opposed by some later
Sunnis and – in an episode that reveals how perilously high the stakes can climb
in BB–BI debates – the young mystic philosopher Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani
(1098–1131) was executed by Seljuk rulers,44 who claimed to hear heretical
echoes of Isma’ili ideas in his claim that God is ‘source’ (masdar) of existence:
‘it is God who is the source [masdar] of existence in all the diversity of its
genera and species’ (Zubdat al-ḥaqa’iq chap. 4).45
The Logic of BB
Reflecting on this survey of the premodern BB tradition, we can identify a few
core convictions and arguments that commonly underlie BB thinking in our
period.
Beyond Knowledge and Language

For BB thinkers, the first principle exceeds our capacity to intellectually
comprehend or linguistically express its nature. All BB thinkers hold to some
version of this apophaticism. (As we will see, it is a commonplace too in the BI
tradition.) Plato, for instance, says of the One that ‘no name belongs to it, nor is
there an account or any knowledge or perception or opinion of it’ (Parmenides
141e).46 Plotinus says that ‘nothing can be predicated of’ the One and so ‘we
say what it is not; what it is, we do not say’ (Enn. III.8.10, V.3.14). The first
principle ‘is altogether outside the realm of language, and it is not knowable in
any way at all’, argues Damascius, and it can only be revealed by ‘the complete
overturning of discourse and thought’ (De prin. I.7). ‘As we plunge into that
darkness which is beyond intellect’, Dionysius warns, ‘we shall find ourselves
not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing’
(Myst. theo. 1033B-C).47 A conviction often in the background of these apo-
phatic approaches is the identity of being and thinking, which was first articu-
lated by Parmenides and echoes through Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic
traditions.48 As the first principle exceeds being, so it exceeds thought and
language, which articulates our thought. John Damascene states this nexus of
ideas succinctly: ‘As regards what God is, it is impossible to say what He is in
His essence . . . [for] He transcends all beings and being itself. And, if
43
Trans. (Khusrav 1949).
44
Political antagonisms are also important in this incident (Safi 2006, 158–200).
45
Trans. (al-Quḍāt 2022). Compare. xvii. 46 Trans. (Plato 1996).
47
Trans. (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987).
48
See Perl (2014). Parmenides: ‘the same is for thinking and for being’ (frag. 3).
knowledge respects beings, then that which transcends knowledge will certainly
transcend essence, and, conversely, what transcends essence will transcend
knowledge’ (De fide I.4).
Not a Being among Beings

‘Is the so-called one principle of all things beyond all things’, asks Damascius,
‘or is it one among all things, as if it were the summit of those that proceed from
it?’ (De prin. I.1). All BB thinkers know the answer to this question. It refers to
the most basic conviction of BB theory: the first principle cannot be ‘a being’
among beings or ‘a thing’ among things. It cannot even be the ‘highest being’
among beings; it must lie beyond beings and being entirely. If the first principle
is to be truly first, it must be the cause of the existence of things, and it therefore
cannot be one of those things whose existence one is seeking to explain –
returning to our box metaphor, if the First is in the box of being, then it is just
another instance of the origin-of-being question, not an answer to it. As Proclus
succinctly puts it, ‘inasmuch as it is the cause of all things, it is no one of all
things’ (In Parm. VI.1108). Or yet more succinctly, Plotinus: ‘The cause of
everything is none of these things’ (Enn. VI.9.6).
Therefore, BB thinkers are constantly denying any entitative status to the first
principle, as we saw repeatedly in our survey of sources – ‘he is not a being [on
estin] . . . because he is beyond all beings [huper panta ta onta]’ (Palamas,
Capita 78). Further, BB thinkers frequently deny that the first principle is in any
sense a ‘what’ or a ‘this’ and set it apart from the formal determinacy that is
characteristic of beings. Thus, according to Plotinus: ‘substance must be a “this
something” . . . [but] “that which transcends Being” does not indicate

a “this” . . . but implies only that it is not this’ (Enn. V.5.6). For these reasons,
the BB tradition often strikes a meontological note, as we saw especially with
Dionysius and Eriugena.
Immanence
However, this BB emphasis on extra-ontological transcendence should not be
understood deistically as indicating a God distant or absent from beings. Indeed,
BB thinkers tend to see the transcendence of the One as the very reason why it is
so immanent to beings. Plotinus argues that because the One is not located and
therefore restricted to a particular place, it is therefore present to everywhere
and everything: ‘as for things which are not somewhere, there is nowhere they
are not’ (Enn. V.5.9). Dionysius argues that God, ‘is the being immanent in and
underlying the things which are’ and this is possible because ‘He is not [oute
estin]. Rather he is the essence of being for the things which have being’ (Div.
God and Being 17
nom. 817D). While the addition of extra principles beyond being in later
Neoplatonists can look like a worried attempt to further distance the first
principle from the world by adding yet more intermediaries – the ‘bureaucratic
fallacy’49 – this can be read, on the contrary, as an attempt to more emphatically
affirm immanence since the Ineffable is, according to Damascius, ‘over the one
and the many’ (De prin. I.1.8) and, therefore, is as ‘close’ to the multiplicity of
beings as it is to transcendent unity.50
Being Is Finite
In the BB tradition, being is typically assumed to be finite, not infinite.51 There

is occasional positive appreciation of the infinite in Greek philosophical trad-
ition before Plotinus, for example, Anaximander’s apeiron arche, some atom-
ists’ infinite void and infinite atoms. But the majority view among the Greeks is
that infinity implies indefiniteness and indeterminacy, while being means to be
a definite and finite thing; a definable and knowable entity determined by
a particular form. Infinity thus tends to comport imperfection. ‘Nothing is
complete which has no end and the end is a limit’, Aristotle argues, and so the
infinite is contrasted with the ‘complete and whole’ and ‘its essence is privation’
(Physics 207a, 207b).52 The Aristotelian-Platonist traditions tend to link being
with form, order, determinacy, and completion, and, in this context, ‘infinite
being’ is a contradiction in terms. Plotinus complicates this picture by constru-
ing the One’s indeterminacy as a perfection: ‘it is something other than all the
things to which “what it is” applies . . . it is indefinite [aoristos]’ (Enn. VI.8.9); it
is ‘unlimited [apeiros] . . . by being incomprehensible in its power’ (VI.9.6).
However, for Plotinus, this infinity is precisely what distinguishes the One from
being,53 which remains finite.
It seems that the possibility of infinite being properly speaking emerges, as
we will see in our BI survey, only with the Anonymous Commentator’s and
Victorinus’ indeterminate and infinitival to einai/esse and Gregory of Nyssa’s
infinite divine substance.
49
See, for example, Osborn (1993, 15). 50 Cf. Milbank (2010) and Shaw (1995).
51
Sweeney (1992); Undusk (2009). With some qualifications, Undusk (2009, 308) observes: ‘not
before Christianity and Neoplatonism (Plotinus), was infinity assigned in the Greek mind
a significant cognitive value, let alone elevating it to the position of highest perfection’.
52
Trans. (Aristotle 1984b).
53
John Rist (1967, 25) argues that, in Plotinus: ‘in view of the general Greek use of “Being” to
mean “finite Being,” the prima facie meaning of the phrase “beyond Being” should be “infinite
Being”’. However, some critics charge that this misunderstands Plotinus: ‘not because of an
accidental restriction on the usage of the term “being,” but because of the philosophically
grounded principle that to be is to be intelligible, being necessarily entails finitude’ (Perl 2007,
12); see also Sweeney (1992, 239–41).
It is not difficult to see how this conviction about the finitude of being factors
into BB deliberations about the first principle. If the first principle is to be
properly transcendent, then it must be beyond being, because being is particular,
formed, and finite, and these characteristics unduly restrict the First’s unlimited
transcendence.
Is BB a Species of Atheism?
Lastly, we must comment on a strangeness in BB thinking that we first noted in

our box of being thought experiment. If God is beyond existence, then this
seems to entail that God does not exist. But doesn’t this mean that all BB
thinkers must be atheists?
This question recalls Jean-Luc Marion’s lament that his book, God Without
Being, ‘suffered from the inevitable and assumed equivocation of its title: was it
insinuating that the God “without being” is not, or does not exist?’ (1995, xix).
Marion replies: ‘Let me repeat now the answer I gave then: no, definitely not. God
is, exists, and that is the least of things’. Marion’s remark can, I think, answer for
the BB tradition too. There is a common-sense way in which all BB thinkers are
‘theists’ (or, if you like, ‘henologists’), in the sense that a transcendent first
principle is there at the head of their metaphysical systems. Denying the prin-
ciple’s existence in this common-sense meaning would be tantamount to saying
that BB thinkers are aligned with philosophers who posit no transcendent, unitary
arche in their systems, such as the ancient atomists. This is obviously false. Taken
in a common-sense way, BB thinkers affirm the existence of the Good, the One,
and the God. To adapt a Derridean phrase, they rightly pass for theists.
But as Marion says – with a hint of impatience – this fact ‘is the least of
things’. Recognising that there is a transcendent first principle is only the
beginning of BB inquiry. What is of deeper philosophical interest is the nature
of this principle and its curious extra-ontological standing in relation to beings.
We therefore should not let the common-sense affirmation of theism domesti-
cate the BB language of epekeina, but, instead, let it do the difficult-to-
understand, metaphysically revisionary work that BB thinkers intend it to do.
For BB thinkers, the first principle is indeed extra-ontological and it should not
be construed as in any sense ‘a being’ that ‘exists’ in the way beings exist, even
if our grammar requires us to sometimes speak in this way to carry on the
philosophical conversation. The meontological streak in the BB tradition espe-
cially indicates this. If we worry that these BB claims diminish the first
principle – ‘the One, like an illusion, doesn’t even exist’ – then we have missed
the BB point. The point of this language is not that God is ‘less’ than being but
that he is somehow ‘more’ than being. Thus, according to John Damascene: ‘for
God and Being 19
He does not belong to the number of beings [onton], not because He does not
exist [mē on], but because He transcends all beings and being itself’ (De fide
I.4).
Depending on one’s philosophical inclinations, the paradoxical language that
is sometimes present in this BB talk about the first principle may seem either
a great virtue or a great vice of the tradition. But from a BB point of view at
least, such talk is a principled attempt to articulate the logic of transcendence,
which requires a first principle that is ‘outside the box’ of being.
2 The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition

Our second God–being tradition holds that the first principle should be identi-
fied with being – it is ‘being itself’. Variations of this BI view become dominant
in the Abrahamic traditions through the Middle Ages, but, like the BB tradition,
its roots extend back to Greeks.
The Greeks
We began the BB tradition with Plato, and we begin our survey of the BI
tradition with Plato’s student, Aristotle (384–322 BCE). The change and com-
ing-to-be that is ubiquitous in nature occurs, according to Aristotle, through the
actualising of latent potentialities in things – for example, a tree emerges by the
actualising of biological potencies in a seed. Aristotle argues that these pro-
cesses require an ultimate explanation, which can only be supplied by an
originary cause that is fully actual and without any potency. This cause is the
First Mover: ‘one actuality always precedes another in time right back to the
actuality of the eternal prime mover’ (Meta. 1050b).54 It is ‘a mover which

moves without being moved, being eternal, substance [ousia], and actuality
[energeia]’ (Meta. 1072a). In ascribing being (ousia) to his First Mover,
Aristotle departs from the Platonist thought of a first principle epekeina tēs
ousias, beyond being.55 He also establishes the first principle’s unique status in
a different way – where the Platonists emphasise a peculiar relation to ousia as
the defining trait of the Good/One, Aristotle uses his actuality–potency frame-
work to emphasise the peculiarly ‘actual’ character of his first substance.
Further, he describes the First Mover in explicitly intellectual and theological
terms: ‘the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality [energeia]’
54
Trans. (Aristotle 1984a).
55
On the other hand, in a fragment of On Prayer reported by Simplicius, Aristotle alludes
sympathetically to the idea of a God epekeina mind, and implicitly epekeina being – but even
here he still seems to put aside the view of his teacher: ‘Aristotle reduces the Good-itself to nous,
dispensing with the mysterious Good which Plato had posited, beyond nous and ousia’ (Menn
1992). Cf. Plotinus’ implicit critique of Aristotle’s first mover in Enn. V.6.
(Meta. 1072a). Thus, Aristotle’s first principle is a God who is intellect (nous),
substance (ousia), and act (energeia). Each of these characteristics will be
important in the subsequent BI tradition.
The next major Greek contributors to BI theory are the Middle Platonists.56
Plutarch (c. 45–120) says that god ‘is one, and fills eternity in a single moment;
he alone really exists [ontos on] and does not change’ (On the E at Delphi,
393B). Alcinous (second century) writes that ‘the first god is eternal,
ineffable . . . complete in every respect: he is divinity, being [ousiotes], truth,
symmetry, good’ (Didaskalikos 10). Numenius (second century) is an especially
interesting case. He describes his first God as ‘the first intellect, which is called
“being itself” [autoon]’ (fr. 17) and he describes his first God as ho on (fr. 13).
Yet, there are BB echoes in Numenius, as when he describes the Good as
‘principle of substance [agathon ousias einai archē]’ (fr. 16). This BB–BI
ambiguity may be deliberate. In an unforgettable image, Numenius compares
the Good to a little fishing boat, glimpsed bobbing between waves:
Imagine someone sitting at the top of a lookout: he catches a quick glimpse of

a small fishing boat – one of those solitary light skiffs, alone, in solitude,
caught between waves – and he recognises it. So must one retreat far from the
objects of perception to join alone with the Good which is alone . . . [in] an
ineffable, a completely indescribable, divine solitude. There are the haunts of
the Good, its pastimes and festivals; but it, in peace, in benevolence, the calm,
the gracious ruler, rides upon being [ousia]. (fr. 2)
This picture of the Good floating on a surface, sailing upon being, seems
deliberately calibrated to position the Good as simultaneously above and within
being (Dillon 2007).

In the background of Middle Platonist views are differing strategies for
synthesising various Platonic texts. Many attribute being positively to the
Good, sometimes in an attempt to conform the Republic 509b’s epekeina with
other apparently ontological descriptions in the Republic – for example, the
Good is the ‘brightest part of being [ontos]’ (518c), the ‘happiest of being
[ontos]’ (526e), and the ‘best among beings [ousi]’ (532c) (Baltes 1997;
Whittaker 1969).57 Different thinkers attempt to either identify or distinguish
the Republic’s Good and the Timaeus’ demiurge, whose intellectual and creative
activity seems to demand a position within being (Kenney 2010, 57–90;
O’Brien 2015). And some attempt to integrate all this with the hypotheses of
56
Unless otherwise noted, Middle Platonist quotations in this section are from Boys-Stones (2017).
57
Matthias Baltes (1997, 22): ‘all Platonists before Plotinus confirm . . . that Plato’s Idea of the
Good is not epekeina tou ontos. For according to all these interpreters of Plato’s philosophy, the
Idea of the Good is something like the highest being, to on auto, which bestows upon all other
things their being’.
God and Being 21
the Parmenides (Turner and Corrigan 2011a). These developments in the

Middle Platonist period propel a general move toward BI versions of
Platonism, though often with residual ambiguities. As Whittaker sums up:
‘there existed in the minds of writers of the Middle Platonic period
a confusion concerning the status of the ultimate principle with reference to
ousia and nous’ (1969, 104).
The God of Exodus

We turn now to BI themes in the Abrahamic traditions. On this score, there is
one intellectual-historical moment that must be noted above all: the Greek
Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14 (c. third–second century BCE). In this
biblical passage, God declares his name to Moses:
God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ [Ehyeh asher Ehyeh / ego eimi ho on].
He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I AM [Ehyeh / ho on]
has sent me to you”’.58
The Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew as ego eimi ho on becomes a common

form in which the text is received by philosophers and theologians in the
Hellenistic and Roman periods (Wilkinson 2015, 44–122). Whereas contem-
porary translators tend to render the Hebrew original into English as something
like ‘I will be what I will be’, the Septuagint phrase conveys something like
‘I am the Self-Existent’. Metaphysical interpretations of the language flour-
ished, and the seminal figure in this interpretive tradition is the Hellenistic
Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE to 50 CE). In his Life of
Moses, Philo glosses Exodus 3:14: ‘[T]ell them that I am He Who is [ho on], that
they may learn the difference between what is [ontos] and what is not [mē
ontos], and also the further lesson that no name at all can properly be used of
Me, to Whom alone existence [to einai] belongs’ (I.75).59
Philo’s interpretation attempts to unify the Hebrew narrative with the Middle
Platonist philosophy in which he was trained (Sterling 2014). He sees the divine
name in apophatic terms as a marker of God’s transcendence above all naming –
‘no personal name even can be properly assigned to the truly Existent [to
onti] . . . [God said] I am He that is [ho on]’, which is equivalent to ‘My nature
is to be [to einai], not to be spoken’ (On the Change of Names II.11).60 The
theological language of ho on and to on in Philo echoes Plato’s language in the
Timaeus, where the speaker Timaeus asks: ‘what is it that always is [to on], but
never comes to be, and what is it that comes to be but never is [on]?’ (27d).61 For
58
New Revised Standard Version, with Hebrew and Septuagint Greek interpolated.
59 60
Trans. (Philo 1935). Trans. (Philo 1934). 61 Trans. (Plato 2008).
Philo, the Mosaic name is an answer to this question: the Hebrew God is none
other than the Being of Plato’s Timaeus. He thus adapts the Platonist ontological
framework to distinguish Abrahamic Creator and creature: ‘God alone has
veritable being [to einai]. This is why [he is called] “I AM He that is,” implying
that others lesser than He have not being . . . but exist in semblance only’ (Quod
deterius 160).62
As we will see, many BI thinkers in our period follow Philonic lines in their
interpretations of the Exodus 3:14 name (Gericke 2012). Indeed, the Exodus
text even influenced pagan thinkers outside the Abrahamic traditions (Kooten
2006, 107–85). The ho on ascription in Numenius noted earlier (fr. 13) is likely
borrowed from the Septuagint (Burnyeat 2006), and in an extraordinary remark
apparently directed at the Exodus text, Numenius asks: ‘what is Plato but Moses
talking Attic?’ (fr. 8).63
The Christian Tradition

A vast swathe of Christian thinkers in our period endorse some version of BI. The
earliest patristic instances tend to share the BB–BI ambiguities of Middle
Platonism. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165), for example, combines both languages
in a single sentence: ‘the very Being [to on] who is the cause of everything the
mind perceives . . . who is beyond all essence [on epekeina pases ousia], who is
ineffable and indescribable, who alone is beautiful and good’ (Dial. chap. 4).64
Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) seems to hedge his position. He argues that
‘as, then, [God] is being [estin ousia], He is the first principle of the department of
action, as He is good, of morals’ (Strom. 4). He elsewhere states that philosophical
inquiry aims at ‘the most excellent essence [ousia] of all’ – apparently a reference
to the divine Word – ‘and essays to go beyond [epekeina] to the God of the
universe’, implying that the Father is beyond ousia (Strom. 1).65 He even suggests
that ‘God is one, and beyond [epekeina] the one and above unity [monada] itself’
(Paedagogus 1).66 These tensions can perhaps be construed as a principled
dimension of Clement’s apophatic theology (Hägg 2006, 153–79).
Origen (c. 185–253) is a particularly intriguing case. He laments the difficulty
of deciding between a BB and BI position (Contra Celsum VI.64).67 He
frequently refers to God in terms of being, often alluding to the Exodus
62
Trans. (Philo 1929).
63
The remark is cited approvingly in Clement, Strom. I.22 and Eusebius, Praep. evan. IX.6; see
Whittaker (1967). Plotinus explicitly rejects a similar formulation: ‘What would [the One] know
about itself? “I am” [ego eimi]? But it is not [ouk esti]!’ (Enn. VI.7.38).
64 65
Trans. (Martyr 2003). Trans. (Schaff 1885). Cf. Protrepticus 88, 117.
66
Trans. (Schaff 1885), trans. modified.
67
Trans. (Origen 1953). Quoted as an epigraph to this study.
God and Being 23
name – for example, ‘in him who truly exists [uere est], who said by Moses, I am
who I am [Ego sum qui sum], all things that are have participation’ (De prin.
I.3.6).68 He contrasts ‘He who is’ with the ‘nothing’ and ‘non-being’ of evil (In
Jo. 2.92–99). But, elsewhere, he appears to take a BB position, following
Republic 509b. He speculates that the Trinitarian Logos may be ‘being of beings
[ousia ousion]’, while the Father transcends ousia (Contra Celsum VI.64) and
seems to positively endorse the view elsewhere: ‘first one apprehends the
truth’ – which here refers to the Johannine Logos – ‘so that in this way he
may come to behold the essence [ousia], or the power and nature of God beyond
the essence [huperekeina tēs ousias]’ (In Jo. 19.37).69 In a very curious passage,
he adapts Plato’s language to argue that the Son (not the Father in this instance)
transcends ‘by’ his being, perhaps suggesting that Platonist transcendence may
in fact be secured through a special sense of ousia,70 which will be a possibility
developed by later BI thinkers. Elsewhere, Origen implies in a passing comment
that Christians might freely go either way: ‘we affirm that the God of the
universe is mind, or that He transcends [epekeina] mind and being [ousias]’
(Contra Celsum VII.38, my italics). Contemporary interpreters can take more or
less sympathetic views of Origen’s BB–BI ambiguities, with some seeing them
as a blunder71 and others as principled articulations of compatible claims.72
We noted several major Eastern figures in our survey of the BB tradition.
One Eastern theologian who is better positioned in the BI tradition is Gregory
of Nyssa (c. 335-395). Commenting on Exodus 3, Gregory argues that ‘what
the great Moses learnt’ is that creaturely things do not have ‘a real existence’,
for ‘the only reality that truly exists is the one that is above all of them, the
cause of all from which everything depends’ (De vita Moysis II.2.24).73 God
is thus the one primary reality: ‘to be totally independent of all else and . . . to
be participated in by all, yet to be in no way thereby diminished, that is to be
The Really Real [to ontos on]’ (II.2.25). Gregory identifies the Good with
divine Being: ‘what really is, is Absolute Good’ (Hom. Eccl. VII.406.1).74 He
is also careful to affirm that the status of ontos on applies equally to all
Trinitarian persons, rejecting Eunomius’ view that the Father is the ‘highest
68
Trans. (Origen 2017). See also Origen’s commentaries on Romans 9:2, John 2:13, and 1
Corinthians 1:28.
69
Trans. (Origen 2006). See also De martyrio 47.
70
In Jo. 13.151 – huperechon ousias. See Widdicombe (1994, 39–40).
71
Raoul Mortley (1986, 75): ‘the issue of God’s relationship with ousia . . . is an embarrassment for
Origen’.
72
Peter Widdicombe (1994, 43): ‘Origen would not have seen a tension between the statement that
God is “he who is” and the statement that God “transcends mind and being.” Indeed, it is possible
that he thought of both as biblical concepts, the one found in Exodus 3: 14, and the other in
Romans 1: 20’.
73 74
Trans. (Meredith 2012). Trans. (Gregory of Nyssa 2012).
and most authentic being’, in contrast to the Son, ‘which exists because of
that being and after that being has supremacy over the rest’ (Contra Eun.
I.156).75
Gregory is particularly significant in the BI tradition for theorising God’s
being as positively infinite.76 ‘The Divine is by its very nature infinite [aoris-
ton], enclosed by no boundary’ (De vita Moysis IV.2.236). And he replies to
Eunomius: ‘if he allows that the underlying being is simple and is properly
related to itself, let him agree that it has attached to it the attributes of the simple
and infinite [apeiron]’ (Contra Eun. I.236). Unlike many BI thinkers thus far,
Gregory is unequivocal in his attribution of being to God.
Turning to Latin Western Christians, we find a large majority expressing
some version of BI. Augustine (354–430) is a leading example. Despite his
frequent praise for Platonist metaphysics, he seems never to be tempted by BB
language. Instead, across his works, he makes straightforward ascriptions of
being to God using a range of terminology (e.g. esse, est, ipsum esse, essentia,
etc.).77 A typical instance occurs in his exposition of Psalm 134:
[God] said, I AM WHO AM [ego sum qui sum] . . . He set aside all [other]
names that could be applied to God and answered that he was called Being
Itself [ipsum esse], as though that were his name. Thus shall you say, he
ordered, HE WHO IS has sent me. His very nature is to be [est] . . . He is true
being [verum esse], unchangeable being [incommutabile esse], and this can
be said of him alone. He is being [Est enim est], as he is also goodness, the
good of all good things. (En. Ps. 134.4)78
Augustine emphasises immutability as the defining trait of divinity. God is the

idipsum, the unique ‘selfsame’: ‘you are supremely “the selfsame” [idipsum] in
that you do not change’ (Conf. IX.4).79 For this reason, ‘being’ in its strict sense
can be ascribed only to God: ‘Is is [esse est]. True is, genuine is, real is [uerum
esse, sincerum esse, germanum esse] belongs only to one who does not change’
(Sermo 7.7).80 Indeed, esse is the most fitting of all descriptions of God:
75
Trans. (Gregory of Nyssa 2018). 76 See Weedman (2010).
77
See, for example, Conf. VII.10; De libero arbitrio III; De moribus ecclesiae catholicae I; De trin.
V-VII; Sermones 7, 7; De vera religione 18; De immortalitate animae XI; De civitate Dei
VIII.11.
78
Trans. (Augustine 2004).
79
Jean-Luc Marion (2012, 301) argues that, because of his ‘equivocity of Being’ between immut-
able divine and mutable creaturely being and despite his frequent BI language, Augustine is best
seen as a BB thinker who escapes ontotheology. As my remarks on ontotheology at the end of
this study will suggest, I am sympathetic to Marion’s post-Heideggerian retrieval of the BI
tradition. But I think this can be done via analogy, not necessarily equivocity, and this arguably is
closer to Augustine’s position.
80
Trans. (Augustine 1990).
God and Being 25
Being [ipsum esse] is in the highest and truest sense of the term proper to Him
from whom being [essentia] derives its name. For what undergoes a change
does not retain its own being . . . therefore, only that which is not only not
changed, but cannot undergo any change at all, can be called being [esse] in
the truest sense without any scruple. (De trin. V.2)81
Whereas creatures exist in some particular kind or mode, for Augustine, God
‘does not exist merely in some degree [modo est] since he is Existence [sed est
est]’ (Conf. XIII.31).82 He thus instructs: ‘we ought, then, to love God the Trinity
in unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this cannot be called anything other
than Being Itself [idipsum esse]’ (De mor. ecc. I.14).83 Augustine’s view here, as
in many matters, exerts a profound influence on the medieval Latin tradition, and
its echo is heard in practically all subsequent BI thinkers in the Latin West.
Moving into the Latin medieval tradition, BI is evident just about everywhere
one looks. I will highlight a few principal thinkers here to illustrate the variety of
ways that the BI position is articulated in this tradition. Boethius (c. 475–526)
describes God as ‘substantial Being [ipsum esse] and substantial Good and essential
Goodness [ipsum esse bonum]’ (Opus. sacra III.149–150).84 Anselm (1033–1109)
uses the language of a ‘supreme reality’ (summa res) (Reply to Gaunilo IV), which
is ‘before and beyond all things [ultra omnia]’ and ‘of all things possesses existence
to the highest degree [maxime omnium habes esse]’ (Proslogion XX, III).85 The
Exodus 3:14 text remains a constant point of reference, as when Hildegard of
Bingen (1098–1179) remarks: ‘it is said “I am who I am” [Ego sum qui sum]. And
he-who-is [qui est] is fullness [plenitudinem] itself’ (Letter 40R).86 She argues that
‘God alone exists [est] in and of himself, nor does he receive his being [esse] from
anything else; rather, any and all creation takes its being [esse] from him’ (Div.
operum II.1.14).87 A BB emphasis on transcending created beings is still often

present in the Latin BI context, as in Richard of St Victor (d. 1173): ‘divine
substance is nothing else than substantial – or better, super-substantial – being. [It
is] substantial because it is a reality subsisting in itself; [it is] super-substantial,
because this reality is not subordinated to anything’ (De trin. IV.19).88
Moving into the thirteenth century, Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280), citing
Avicenna, notes that ‘being is more truly ascribed to God than to anything else’
(In Myst. theo. V.4).89 He argues that, in the divine first principle, ‘because it does
not have esse from another, esse is per se . . . “this which it is” [hoc quod est] and
its esse are one’ (De causis et processu I.1.8).90 Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274)
81 82
Trans. (Augustine 2002). Trans. (Augustine 1991). 83 Trans. (Augustine 2010).
84 85
Trans. (Boethius 1968). Trans. (Anselm 1979).
86 87
Trans. (Hildegard of Bingen 1994). Trans. (Hildegard of Bingen 2018).
88
Trans. (Richard of Saint Victor 2011). 89 Trans. (Albert the Great 1988).
90
Trans. (Vargas 2013, 634).
argues that esse is the primary name of God, for he is ‘pure being [esse purum],
simple being [esse simpliciter], and absolute being [esse absolutum] . . . the most
actual [actualissimum], the most perfect, and the supremely one being’ (Itin.
V.5).91 The first principle is ‘most pure and absolute being [esse purissimum et
absolutum]’ and has being ‘in an unqualified sense [simpliciter esse]’ (V.8). Still,
in a Dionysian spirit, the Itinerarium gives the final word to the name of Bonum:
‘just as being itself [ipsum esse] is the foundational principle’ for knowing divine
attributes, ‘so the good [ipsum bonum] is the most basic foundation for our
contemplation of the emanations [of the Trinitarian persons]’ (VI.1).92
Reaching a little beyond our stated historical period, BI themes are evident in
later women theologians. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) states, in the divine
voice, ‘Know that no one can escape my hands, for I am who I am [Ego sum qui
sum], whereas you have no being at all [non es]’ (Dialogue 18).93 And Julian of
Norwich (1342-c. 1416), writing in the Middle English vernacular, praises ‘oure
hye fader, almighty God, which is [beyng], he knew us and loved us fro before
ony time’ (Revelation of Love chap. 59).94
The Islamic-Arabic Tradition

We noted earlier that some Islamic thinkers hold a BB position (e.g. al-Sijistani).
However, the majority hold BI views in our period, even while a creative
and subtle inheritance of Neoplatonist ideas is evident across the tradition
(D’Ancona 2011).
Some of the most important texts for Islamic BI thinking emerge in ninth-
century Baghdad. Al-Kindi (c. 800–870), often celebrated as the first philoso-
pher in the Arabic tradition, freely attributes being terminology to God: he is

‘the true Being [al-anniyya al-haqq] who has not, and never will be, non-being
[lays], who has always been, and always will be, being [‘ays]’ (On the
Proximate Agent Cause I.1.215).95 Probably more important than Kindi’s own
views are the positions developed by scholars in the ‘circle of al-Kindi’
(Endress 1997), who translated/adapted Platonist texts and ideas into a new
Arabic linguistic and religious context, often with Christian scholars contribut-
ing to the work. An especially important set of texts for our purposes is the
Arabic Plotiniana, which are based on passages from Plotinus.96 In the longest
of these texts, the so-called Theology of Aristotle, which in reality is composed
91
Trans. (Bonaventure 2002).
92
Cf. Peperzak (1998). J. G. Bougerol judged that Bonaventure was ‘without a doubt the most
Dionysian mind of the Middle Ages’ – see Tobon (2022).
93
Trans. (Noffke 1980). 94 Watson and Jenkins (2006).
95
Trans. (Pormann and Adamson 2012).
96
Translations of Arabic Plotiniana texts in this section are from Adamson (2002b, 124–37).
God and Being 27
of selections from the Enneads, the first cause is described as ‘the First Being
[al-anniyya al-ula] . . . the Creator, the Maker, exalted be His name’ (I.47). It is
‘one and simple, originating the simple things all at once, through being alone
[bi-annihi faqat]’ (X.175) and is ‘the thing existing truly in act . . . he is pure act
[al-mahd]’ (III.47). The Sayings of the Greek Sage similarly argues that the First
Originator ‘has no shape [hilya] and no particular inherent form . . . He is only
being [anniyya faqat], having no attribute suitable to Him’ (I.10).
Another important text is the Discourse on the Pure Good, sometimes called
the Arabic De causis, which adapts passages from Proclus’ Elements of
Theology and became enormously influential in its subsequent Latin version,
the Book of Causes (Liber de causis). It describes God as the pure being (al-
anniyya mahda, prop. 4) and contrasts Intellect, which ‘possesses formal
adornment because it is being [anniyya] and form’, with the First Cause,
which either ‘has no formal adornment because ‘It is only being [anniyya
faqaṭ]’ or, if we are forced to speak of form, then ‘Its formal adornment is
infinite and Its individual nature is the Pure Good’ (prop. 8).97
The Arabic Plotiniana and Procleana thus use Neoplatonic sources to arrive
at positions that sound very un-Neoplatonic. In depicting God as first being,
being alone, pure being, and so on, these Arabic texts depart from the ‘One
beyond being’ in Plotinus and Proclus, and they do it in the very act of
translating core BB key texts (D’Ancona 2023). The result is a novel adaptation
of Neoplatonist metaphysics into an Arabic–Abrahamic–monotheistic concep-
tual context.
The influence of this framework is evident in subsequent Islamic thinkers,
such as al-Farabi (c. 870–950) who construes God as the highest existence
(mawjud) and the cause of existence (wujud), which enjoys ‘the most elevated
rank of perfect existence’ and ‘is different in substance from everything else’
(Perfect State 1.1–2).98
A major inheritor of this tradition is Avicenna (980–1037), usually regarded
as the greatest Islamic thinker in our period. Avicenna frequently refers to God
in ontological terms, especially with his preferred description, Necessary
Existent (wajib al-wujud). An especially illuminating text is Book VIII of the
Metaphysics, part of his magnum opus, The Healing (Kitāb al-Shifā).99 Here
Avicenna states that there is ‘something whose existence is necessary . . . [and
this] Necessary Existent is one, nothing sharing with Him in His rank . . . He is
the principle of the necessitation of the existence of everything’ (VIII.4.1). He
explains: ‘the primary attribute of the Necessary Existent consists in his being
97 98
Trans. (Adamson 2002a; Taylor 2020). Trans. (Walzer 1985).
99
Trans. (Avicenna 2005).
“a that” [annahu] and an existent [mawjud]’ (VIII.7.12). This account of God as

the Necessary Existent relies on Avicenna’s distinctive metaphysics of essence
(al-dat, mahiyya) and existence (al-inniyya, anniyya) (Lizzini 2003), which,
roughly speaking, distinguishes between what something is (its essence, nature,
quiddity, and thingness) and the fact that something is (its existence and
realisation). In the background here, in addition to his Arabic influences, is
probably Aristotle’s old distinction between the question of ‘what’ a thing is and
‘if’ or ‘that’ a thing is.100 Avicenna holds that all beings have an essence, but
their existence is contingent – they might not exist – and they must receive
existence from another. The single exception is God, whose existence is neces-
sary and a source of being for creatures. Thus, Avicenna uses essence/existence
and contingency/necessity to articulate a distinctive version of the BI position:
God is identified with being in the sense that he is necessary being, the unique
Necessary Existent who gives existence to the essences of contingent creatures.
Despite his novelties, Avicenna is evidently still working in the tradition of
Arabic Neoplatonism discussed earlier. In particular, he identifies the Necessary
Existent with ‘pure being’ (mugarrad al-wugud) and ‘thatness’ (anniyya):
[T]here is no quiddity for the Necessary Existent other than its being the
Necessary Existent. And this is ‘thatness’ [al-anniyya] (VIII.4.9).
The First, hence, has no quiddity [mahiyyata]. Those things possessing

quiddities have existence emanate on them from Him. He is pure existence
[mugarrad al-wugud] with the condition of negating privation and all other
description of Him. (VIII.4.13)
Avicenna thus appears to appropriate the Arabic De causis’ notion of a first

principle of pure being (anniyya faqat) (Bertolacci 2020; D’Ancona 2000). As

the De causis argues that the first cause has no form ‘because It is only being
[anniyya faqat]’, so Avicenna argues that God has no quiddity/essence because
he is only anniyya or pure existence.101 His BI position can thus be seen as
continuing the Arabic reworking of the Plotinian ‘One beyond being’ into a God
of ‘pure being’, while retaining a basic BB insight: Avicenna’s first principle, as
pure existence, is without essence and therefore beyond essence, like Plato’s
Good.102
100
See Posterior Analytics II; De Interpretatione XI; Metaphysics V.5 and V.7.
101
Avicenna elsewhere speaks positively about a divine essence/quiddity and determining his
settled view is complicated (Rosheger 2002).
102
Indeed, Avicenna’s student al-Marzuban (d. 1066) reports that, for Avicenna, ‘the closest we
can come to grasping [God’s] true nature is by thinking of Him as being per se’ but because ‘He
is intrinsically the very cause of being . . . His essence should be regarded as beyond-being
[fawq al-wujud]’ (Kars 2019, 91).
God and Being 29
Islamic thinkers after Avicenna carry on intense debates about theological

ontology, but the Avicennian framework tends to set the terms of discussion. For
instance, Al-Ghazali’s (1058–1111) On the Incoherence of the Philosophers and
Averroes’ (1126–1198) response, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, dispute
the relationship between God’s quiddity (mahiyya) and existence (wujud).103
While they disagree with each other and Avicenna over various modal, linguis-
tic, and metaphysical issues, Ghazali and Averroes assume the basic Avicennian
view that God is the Necessary Existent.
The Jewish Tradition

We have already noted one Jewish thinker central to the BI tradition, namely
Philo. Other important Jewish BI thinkers emerge in the medieval period,
working in the wake of some Islamic figures we have just noted and in some
cases sharing their Arabic linguistic and intellectual milieu (Harvey 2004).
The pre-eminent figure is, of course, Maimonides (1138–1204). Maimonides
frequently attributes being (wujud, anniyya) to God. Following Avicenna, he
construes God as the Necessary Existent (wajib al-wujud) (e.g. Guide II.2) and
argues that ‘we are only able to apprehend the fact that He is [anniyya] and
cannot apprehend His quiddity [mahiyya]’ (I.58). It is God’s uncaused status
that makes his existence necessary: ‘as for that which has no cause for its
existence, there is only God . . . His existence is necessary. Accordingly, His
existence is identical with His essence and His true reality, and His essence is
His existence’ (I.57). Like Philo and other Jews before him, he interprets the
Exodus 3:14 name in an ontological fashion: ‘I am that I am. This is a name
deriving from the verb to be [hayah], which signifies existence, for hayah
indicates the notion: he was . . . [This leads to] the view that there is
a necessarily existent thing’ (Guide I.63).
One complication in Maimonides’ BI position, however, is his famously
apophatic view of theological speech and its application to ‘being’ talk about
God. He proposes: ‘the term “existent” is predicated of Him, may He be exalted,
and of everything that is other than He, in a purely equivocal sense. Similarly
the terms “knowledge,” “power,” “will,” and “life”’ (I.56; cf. I.35). He explains:
‘the qualificative attributions ascribed to Him and the meaning of the attribu-
tions known to us have nothing in common in any respect or in any mode; these
attributions have in common only the name and nothing else’ (I.56). This starkly
apophatic view might encourage us to align Maimonides more with the BB
tradition. If ontological talk does not attribute being to God in any true or
substantial sense, then perhaps God is, in the end, beyond being in a Plotinian
103
See Al-Ghazali (2002) and Averroes (2016).
fashion. However, alongside claims about equivocation, Maimonides appears to

set apart the biblical Tetragrammaton YHWH – which he seems to align with
the Exodus 3:14 name in Guide I.62–63 (Lobel 2020) – as the sole exception to
the rule of equivocation. YHWH ‘has been originated without any derivation . . .
and for this reason it is called the articulated name. This means that this name
gives a clear unequivocal indication of His essence’ (Guide I.61). What is the
meaning of the exceptional name, YHWH? Maimonides acknowledges that the
linguistic origins of the term are mysterious but suggests that ‘perhaps [YHWH]
indicates the notion of a necessary existence [wajib al-wujud] according to the
[Hebrew] language’ (I.61). He later confirms this: ‘all names are derived or are
used equivocally, as Rock and others similar to it’, excepting only YHWH,
which signifies ‘simple existence and nothing else. Now absolute existence
implies that He shall always be, I mean He who is necessarily existent’ (I.63).
Though there are debates around Maimonides’ view of the Tetragrammaton
(Segal 2021), it gives us sufficient reason to count him as a BI thinker, even with
his doctrine of equivocity.
Many Jewish thinkers in our period after Maimonides take BI positions.
For instance, Gersonides (1288–1344) resists the extremities of the
Rambam’s apophaticism and argues that ‘such terms as “exists,” “one,”
“essence” . . . are said of God by priority and of others beside Him by
posteriority. This is so because His existence, oneness, and essence belong
to Him by virtue of Himself’ (Wars III.3).104 We can therefore affirm that
‘God is more properly called “existent” and “one” than anything else’, as is
confirmed by the Mosaic name, ‘I am what I am, which is a term signifying
being and existence’.105 Ibn Gabirol (eleventh century) describes God as first
being (primum esse) and ‘only being’ (esse tantum) (Fons Vitae V.32,
V.24).106 And Falaquera’s thirteenth-century Hebrew adaptation of the
Fons Vitae argues that ‘the Most High is existence not possessing quiddity,
quality, or quarity [i.e. final causation]’.107
As we noted in our BB survey, the Sethian Gnostics (second–third century)
are arguably part of the Jewish tradition, and some BI themes are evident in their
enigmatic texts (Corrigan and Rasimus 2013). The Apocryphon of John states
that the first principle ‘is not at all someone who exists [etshoop], but he is
something superior [ouhōb efsotp] to them, not as being superior, but as being
104
Trans. (Gersonides 2008).
105
Cf. Wars III.3: ‘God is that which disposes all other things to be substances, because he gives
them their substantiality. Hence, he is more properly called substance’.
106
Ibn Gabirol (2005).
107
Trans. (Shem Tov b. Joseph Falaquera and Solomon ibn Gabirol 2008). For the Hebrew
terminology for ‘existence’ (haluth) in the background here, see Altman and Stern (2010,
13n2).
God and Being 31
himself [epōf emmin emmof pe]’ (Berlin Codex 24).108 And Allogenes argues
that ‘he is an entity insofar as he exists . . . although he acts without Mind or Life
or Existence or Non-existence, incomprehensibly’ (XI.61 NH Codex).109
The Act of Being

To bring our survey of the BI tradition to its most renowned contributor, Thomas
Aquinas, we need to retrace our historical steps. At some point in late antiquity,
a novel notion of being as act emerged, opening new possibilities for thinking
about existence as a pure, undetermined, and infinite activity. In this section, we
will trace the emergence of this ‘act of being’ concept, which eventually
informs Aquinas’ celebrated account of God as ipsum esse subsistens.
The Anonymous Commentary
Our first port of call is an obscure and fragmentary text known today as the
Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Bechtle 1999). Discovered in
the 1870s and only partially preserved, it has received considerable attention
following the ground-breaking work of Pierre Hadot, who attributed it to
Porphyry (Hadot 1968). The authorship remains contested, with alternatives
including second-century Middle Platonists, Sethian Gnostics, or a post-
Plotinian figure (Clark 2017; Turner and Corrigan 2011a). Hadot’s position
probably has majority support today. For the purposes of this study, we need not
take a view and will remain agnostic regarding authorship.
In fragment V, the Anonymous Commentator confronts a difficulty in
the second hypothesis of Plato’s Parmenides (142b-155e). Like some
Platonists noted in our BB survey, the Commentator holds that there are two
Ones, mapping on to different elements of the Parmenides discussion.
According to the Commentator, Plato holds that the second One ‘participates
in substance [ousias]’. But how is this possible, when the first principle is
supposed to be ‘beyond substance’, as the Republic 509b text has it? In what
being does the second One participate?
Behold whether Plato does not seem to speak in riddles, because the One,
which is ‘beyond substance’ and beyond being [epekeina ousias kai ontos] on
the one hand is neither being nor substance nor activity [energeia], but on the
other hand acts and is itself pure act [energein katharon], so that it is also the
108
Trans. (Wisse and Waldstein 1995, 186). John Turner (2001, 504): the Sethian Gnostic first
principle, ‘although strictly beyond existence, he has a “non-being existence,” a pre-existing or
prefigurative or paradigmatic existence from which actual Existence derives’. There are
similarities here with the Anonymous Commentary, which we will discuss in detail in the
following.
109
Trans. (Turner 2001, 506).
being before being [to einai to pro tou ontos]. By participating in it the other
One receives a derivative being [to einai], which indeed is to participate in
being. Thus, being is double [ditton to einai]: the one exists prior to being
[ontos], the other is brought forth from the One which is beyond, the absolute
being [einai to apoluton] and as it were ‘idea’ of being [idea tou ontos]. (frag.
V)110
To solve the puzzle of two Ones, the Commentator here splits his notion of
being in two: ‘being is double’. The being of the first One is absolute einai
and pure energeia; it is einai before ontos; it is beyond ousia and ontos; it
serves as the idea of ontos. The being of the second One, on the other hand, is
derivative and participated ontos. This innovative ‘double being’ structure
integrates the Aristotelian notion of act (energeia) with being so that the first
principle’s pure being is identified with pure activity (energein katharon).
The Anonymous Commentator thus proposes a new sense of ‘being’ as
unrestricted and undetermined activity, articulated with the infinitive to
einai, to indicate action abstracted from any particular subject. As Jean-
François Courtine observes, ‘we must indeed emphasize the boldness of the
[Commentator] . . . this entails a profound redefinition of being (to einai = to
energein), taken in an active sense, and rigorously distinguished from what
exists’ (2014, 303).
Victorinus
The Commentator’s double being framework appears to be reflected in the Latin
writings of the Christian thinker, Victorinus (290–364), and it is very likely that
there is direct influence (Bradshaw 2004, 108–14; Cooper 2016; Hadot

1968).111 While Victorinus can sometimes speak in straightforward BB
style,112 in an important passage, he clarifies that there is a peculiar sense of
‘being’ attributable to his first principle, which in Victorinus’ Trinitarian con-
text now refers to the Father:
Before the existent [on] and before the Logos, there is that force and that
power of being [exsistendi] that is designated by the word ‘to be’ [esse], in
Greek to einai. This very ‘to be’ [ipsum esse] must be taken under two modes,
one that is universal and originally original, and from it comes the ‘to be’
[esse] for all others; and according to another mode, all others have ‘to be’
110
Trans. (Bradshaw 2004, 103).
111
An additional line of influence here may run through the Sethian Gnostic treatises (Tomassi
2022; Turner 2007).
112
For example, Adv. Cand. 13.7: ‘[God] is above every existent [on] and the truly existents [ton
onton] . . . because he is above existents, he has nothing from existents. God is therefore
nonexistent [mē on]’ (trans. (Victorinus 1981)).
God and Being 33
[esse], this is the ‘to be’ [esse] of all those which come after God, genera or
species or other things of this kind. But the first ‘to be’ [esse] is so unparti-
cipated that it cannot even be called one or alone, but rather, by preeminence,
before the one, before the alone, beyond simplicity, preexistence rather than
existence, universal of all universals, infinite [infinitum], unlimited
[interminatum] . . . [This is] ‘to be’ in itself [ipsum esse], ‘to live’ in itself,
not to be something [aliquid esse] or to live something. Whence, it is not
existent [on]. For the existent [on] is something determined, intelligible,
knowable. (Ad. Arium IV.19)113
Victorinus presents here a Latin adaptation of the Commentator’s double

being structure. The first divine being is esse – a term which Victorinus
explicitly notes is a rendering of to einai – abstracted from particularity. It is
ipsum esse in an infinite, undetermined, and unrestricted way; it is not
particularised, not to-be-something (aliquid esse) but to-be itself and as
such (ipsum esse). This esse is not determinate, as is the case in the esse of
particular existing beings (on). Like the Commentator, Victorinus also iden-
tifies this infinitive esse with action. As he explains elsewhere: ‘this “to be”
itself [ipsum esse], which is the Father, by the very fact that it is “to be” [esse]
is to act [agere] and to work [operari]. For up there “to be” [esse] does not
differ from “to act” [operari]’ (Ad Cand. 19). Thus, the Father is ‘at once “to
be” [esse] and “to act” [operari]’; he is ‘first act [actio] and first existence
[exsistentia]’ (Adv. Arium I.33). Victorinus’ Trinitarian theology thus aims at
‘identifying Being with Action, referring to it as Power of Being or
Substantial Action’ (Clark 1972). David Bradshaw sees this Latin construal
of being-as-act as Victorinus’ major conceptual advance:
In effect we find in Victorinus a further specification of the energein katharon

of the Anonymous Commentary. This energein now turns out to be esse, the
unlimited and uncircumscribed being of the Father, from which is derived all
the limited and circumscribed being (on) found in the Son. Such esse is
anything but ‘being’ conceived as a static condition of existence; it is
a kind of inwardly directed activity, containing implicitly life and intelligence
as well as existence. (Bradshaw 2004, 114)
With the Anonymous Commentator and Victorinus, then, we find a combination of

Aristotle’s notion of the prime mover as pure intellectual act (energein) with the
Platonist notion of a first principle beyond being (epekeina ousias), which is used to
re-imagine the Platonic transcendence of ousia/ontos in terms of an undetermined,
infinite, and divine act of being (to einai or esse). With the Commentator and
Victorinus, we therefore hear the first Greek and Latin articulations of divine being
in the infinitive, unqualified sense of ipsum esse and actus purus, which Aquinas
113
Trans. (Victorinus 1981).
will later conceptualise with such sophistication.114 That this idea emerges first in
two thorough-going Platonists is an irony that will not be lost on readers of Étienne
Gilson.115
Transmission to the Scholastics

Though it is highly probable that the Anonymous Commentator’s notion of pure
act einai exerts a long-distance influence on Aquinas, the lines of transmission
are hard to draw. One likely route for the Anonymous Commentator’s notion of
double being into the Middle Ages is through Boethius.116 Boethius was famil-
iar with some of Victorinus’ writings, likely including the Adversus Arium texts
cited earlier. In his De hebdomadibus, Boethius distinguishes between esse and
id quod est (what it is):
Being [esse] and a concrete thing [id quod est] are different. Simple being
[ipsum esse] awaits manifestation [nondum est], but a thing [id quod est] is
and exists as soon as it has received the form which gives it being [forma
esse]. (Opus. sacra III prop. 2)
Boethius’ esse/id quod est distinction appears to correspond with Victorinus’

esse/on distinction. In each case, being has two senses: the first is an indeter-
minate esse and the second is esse determined by a form to become a concrete
being: ‘on is esse determined by a certain form’ (Victorinus); ipsum esse is ‘not
yet’ being (nondum est), but id quod est exists upon receiving a form (Boethius).
For his part, Boethius is describing ontology in general in this passage, not
Trinitarian theological ontology, but it is possible that this sense of esse is in
play also in his descriptions elsewhere of God as transcendent ipsum esse.117
Another possible transmission route for the Commentator’s double being is

the Arabic tradition. Richard Taylor, following French scholarship,118 argues
that the language of pure being (anniyya faqat) and pure act (al-fil al-mahd) in
the Arabic Plotiniana and Procleana appears to echo the Commentary’s ener-
gein katharon and to einai (Taylor 1998). He suggests that the Commentator’s
novel theological ontology thus passes into the Latin West via translations of
Avicenna and the De causis. Some are not convinced – Christine D’Ancona, for
instance, argues that the precise distinction between einai and on is not present
in the Arabic sources and prefers a Pseudo-Dionysian source for the Arabic pure
114
Mary Clark (2007, 286): ‘Victorinus seems to have been the first to call the Judaeo-Christian
God Esse in a positive and infinite sense’.
115
We will discuss Gilson’s neo-Thomistic allergy to Platonism in the following.
116
Pierre Hadot (1963) suggested this, and several scholars have advanced the view, for example,
Bradshaw (1999), Brock (2007), Corrigan (1984), and Rosheger (2001).
117
See citations in survey treatment of Boethius above. See also Gersh (1986, 679–83).
118
Thillet (1971); Pines (1971).
God and Being 35
being language.119 Others support Taylor’s proposal – Michael Chase even

suggests that ‘the most striking common feature’ of the Greek, Latin, and
Arabic traditions, namely ‘the description of the First Principle as Being
(Greek to einai, Latin esse, Arabic anniyya)’, may emerge from a shared
‘philosophical koinê’ proposed single-handedly by Porphyry in the
Parmenides Commentary (Chase 2020, 2022, 476). We cannot adjudicate the
debate here, but we can confidently say that the notion of pure being and pure act
developed by Aquinas has prior analogues (if not sources) in the Arabic tradition.
A third possible route to Latin scholasticism is through Augustine. Sarah
Klittenic Wear argues that Augustine’s Trinitarian metaphysics, particularly as
expressed in his exposition of John 5:19, reflects Victorinus’ account of esse and
potentia in Father and Son and, therefore, also the Anonymous Commentator’s
account of einai/energeia and dunamis in the First and Second One.120 Mary
Clark suggests that Augustine’s treatment of divine substance in De trinitate
V.2 – where he argues that ‘Being [ipsum esse] is in the highest and truest sense
of the term proper to Him from whom being [essentia] derives its name’ –
reflects Victorinus’ view of the Father’s infinite esse.121 Some scholars doubt
a significant influence on Augustine in this area.122 If the link with Augustine is
in fact plausible, then we can see Augustine123 and Victorinus124 as working at
the same task of ‘flattening’ or ‘telescoping’ Platonist hypostases in conformity
with emerging Christian orthodoxy, according to which the three Trinitarian
hypostases are ontologically coequal.125 This flattening of hypostases, which is
carried on in other patristic contexts too,126 shifts the crucial ‘ontological
difference’ from a distinction between first and second hypostases in the
pagan Platonists to an Abrahamic distinction between divine and created

being. Such Christian revisions to Platonist frameworks do not deter patristic
theologians from sometimes happily acknowledging affinities between
Christian and Platonist triple hypostases (Radde-Gallwitz 2020).
119
D’Ancona-Costa (1995, 121–54); D’Ancona (2011).
120
Wear (2011). See also the related discussion in Byers (2022). 121 Clark (2007, 290).
122
See, for example, Bradshaw (2004, 114–15) and Hadot (1968).
123
David Bradshaw (2008, 240): ‘[in Augustine] the greatest change from Plotinus consists not in
collapsing the distinction of hypostases, but in rejecting the hierarchical ranking that allows the
One and Intellect to differ in respect to being, unity, and intelligibility’.
124
Mary Clark (2009, 92): ‘Victorinus has effectively eliminated subordinationism within the
Platonian triad . . . action was then seen to be subsistent, substantial, and capable of distinguish-
ing the Three Persons’.
125
The Trinitarian ‘flattening’ can be compared / contrasted with Porphyry’s ‘telescoping of
hypostases’, which so disturbs later Neoplatonists (Lloyd 1970, 287–93).
126
For instance, in the Cappadocians – see Lilla (1997, 154–67). Indeed, Rowan Williams argues
that the whole Arian controversy is in part a dispute about whether and how this flattening
should proceed (Williams 2002, 181–268).
Thomas Aquinas
With this genealogy of the ‘act of being’ in mind, we now turn to Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274), the pre-eminent BI thinker of the Middle Ages. There are
several aspects to note in Aquinas’ account of God and being.127 First are
linguistic issues. Aquinas gives a privileged place to ‘being’ in his treatments
of the divine names.128 He sees the Exodus 3:14 name as the ‘most proper’
name of God, more proper even than ‘Good’, because the name ‘does not
signify form, but simply existence itself’ (ST I.13.11 resp.).129 With other divine
names ‘some mode of substance is determined’, but qui est is indeterminate and
so it best indicates the divine infinity. The attribution of being follows Aquinas’
doctrine of analogy: perfections are attributed to God in neither a univocal nor
a purely equivocal sense but ‘in an analogous sense [secundum analogiam]’ (ST
I.13.5 resp.). Thus, ‘being’ and other perfections such as ‘good’ and ‘life’ are
truly attributed to God, even if God’s transcendence entails that we say more
than we know when we make such predications.130 For perfections ‘pre-
exist . . . in Him in a more eminent way than can be understood or signified’
(ST I.13.2 ad 2).
These linguistic considerations map onto Aquinas’ metaphysics of divine
causation: perfections are attributed ‘according to the relation of a creature to
God as its principle and cause wherein all perfections of things pre-exist
excellently’ (ST I.13.5 resp.). Aquinas deploys Platonist metaphysics of partici-
pation to explain this structure:
[A]ll beings apart from God are not their own being [esse], but are beings by
participation [participant esse]. Therefore it must be that all things which are
diversified by the diverse participation of being, so as to be more or less

perfect, are caused by one First Being [primo ente], Who is most perfectly
[perfectissime est]. (ST I.44.1 resp.)131
Aquinas elsewhere puts this in terms of ‘having’ esse versus ‘being’ esse: ‘that
which has existence [habet esse] but is not existence, is a being [ens] by
participation’ (ST I.3.4 resp.), but unlike creatures, the first cause ‘does not
have participated being [esse participatum], but it itself is pure being [esse
purum]’ (In De causis prop. 9).132 Whereas the existence of all creatures is the
127
There is a vast literature relevant to Aquinas’ account of God and being. Useful recent work in
English includes: Velde (1995); O’Rourke (1992); Cullen and Harkins (2019).
128
See In Sent. I d. 8 q. 1 a. 1; In Div. nom. V.11 De potentia dei 7.5; ST I.13.11.
129
Trans. (Aquinas 1920).
130
Cf. Denys Turner (2004, 185–6): ‘Of course, we could not know what it means to say that God is
“pure act,” ipsum esse subsistens . . . [these phrases are] intended to mark out with maximum
clarity and precision the locus of the divine incomprehensibility’.
131 132
Trans. modified. Trans. (Aquinas 1996).
God and Being 37
effect of a prior cause, God is ‘just existence [esse tantum]’ and is the ‘cause of
existing [causa essendi]’ in all beings (De ente 3).133 The distinction of essence
and existence – a version of which we encountered in Avicenna – functions for
Aquinas in a similar way. Every creature is composed of an essence (essentia),
which determines ‘what’ it is, and a distinct existence (esse), by which it is a real
and existing thing. God is the single instance in which essence and existence are
identical, and so the ‘what’ of God is simply his own existence:
For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by
sharing the sun’s nature; so God alone is Being in virtue of His own Essence
[est ens per essentiam], since His Essence is His existence [essentia est suum
esse]; whereas every creature has being by participation [est ens participa-
tive], so that its essence is not its existence. (ST I.104.1 resp.)
One perhaps surprising upshot of this account of participation and essence/

existence is that, for Aquinas, God is ‘beyond being’ in a sense strikingly
similar to Platonist formulations. For Aquinas, God lies outside the realm of
beings and being – he cannot be ‘in the box’ of being. God ‘must be understood
as existing outside of the order of beings [extra ordinem entium existens] as
a cause producing the whole of being [totum ens] and all its differences’ (In Peri
herm. I.14.22).134 He is the principle and source of all existence (fontale
principium totius esse) (SCG I.68); he ‘is not contained in the genus of sub-
stance but is above all substance [supra omnem substantiam]’ (De pot. 7.3 ad
4);135 he is outside the ‘common being’ (ens commune, esse commune) shared
by creatures;136 he is outside being qua being, which is studied in the discipline
of metaphysics, as its principle and cause (In Boet. De trin. V.4). Indeed,
a salutary apophatic theology ‘will remove even this very being [ipsum esse]
from Him, according as it is in creatures’ (In Sent. I.8.1).137
Because God is outside creaturely being in these ways, Aquinas is even
willing to countenance language of God’s ‘non-existence’. Responding to
Dionysius’ claim that ‘God is not something existing [non est existens]; but
He is rather super-existence [supra existentia]’, Aquinas responds: ‘God is not
said to be not existing as if He did not exist at all, but because He exists above all
that exists [est supra omne existens]; inasmuch as He is His own existence’ (ST
I.12.1 ad 3). Or again: ‘God, since he is the cause of all existing things, himself
is nothing of existing things [nihil est existentium], not as though failing from
133 134 135

Trans. (Aquinas 1968). Trans. (Aquinas 1962) Trans. (Aquinas 1952).
136
In Div. nom. V.II.660: ‘God himself is not of being [non ipse Deus est esse], that is, of common
being [esse communis] itself . . . all existing things are contained under common being itself
[ipso esse communi], yet God is not, but rather common being is contained under his virtue’. Cf.
ST I.3.4 ad 2; SCG I.26.
137
being [deficiens ab essendo], but supereminently segregated from all things’ (In
Div. nom. I.3.83).138 The same analysis that we suggested for BB thinkers
applies also to Aquinas: God in a sense does not exist, not because he is less
than being but because he is somehow more than being.
Lastly, and most importantly for his account of God and being, Aquinas
inherits and advances the ‘act of being’ tradition that we have been tracing in
this section. He systematically applies the Aristotelian act–potency framework
to the most basic ‘act’ of all: esse, the act of existing. ‘Existence [esse]’, he
argues, ‘denotes a kind of act [actum], since a thing is said to exist not through
being in potency, but through being in act’ (SCG I.22).139 Existence (esse)
should then be thought of more as an action or activity, rather than property, fact,
or state of affairs. Existence is a verb: the word ‘is’ (est) ‘signifies to be in act
[actu esse], and therefore signifies in the mode of a verb’ (In Peri. herm. lect. 5).
Grammatically, esse is the Latin infinitive ‘to be’: as a runner performs the act of
running (‘to run’), so a being (ens) performs the act of existing (‘to be’, esse) (In
De hebd. lect. 2).140 This ‘act’ character of existence establishes esse’s central
place in Aquinas’ metaphysics – it is ‘the actuality of all acts [actualitas
omnium actuum], and therefore, the perfection of all perfections’ (De pot. q. 7
a. 2 ad 9).141
Aquinas’ understanding of esse as act informs his theological ontology. ‘In
God there is nothing of potency . . . he is pure act [purum actum]’ (SCG I.22);
the first cause ‘is infinite act [actus infinitus], as having in itself the entire
fullness of being [essendi plenitudinem], not contracted to any generic or
specific nature’ and therefore not ‘limited [finiretur]’ by a specific nature (De
spir. creat. 1 resp.).142 The Anonymous Commentator’s pure act einai and
Victorinus’ indeterminate esse, which is not ‘to-be something’ (aliquid esse)

but ‘to-be itself’ (ipsum esse), echoes here in Aquinas’ divine act of being. And
it is reflected in Aquinas’ most celebrated description of God, ipsum esse
subsistens: ‘[God] is supremely being [maxime ens], inasmuch as His being is
not determined by any nature to which it is adjoined; since He is being itself,
subsistent [ipsum esse subsistens], absolutely undetermined [omnibus modis
indeterminatum]’ (ST I.11.4 resp.).
The angelic doctor thus develops a sophisticated rendition of BI theological
ontology, integrating Platonist transcendence and participation, Aristotelian
act–potency, and Avicennian essence–existence with a distinctive ‘double
being’ notion of divine esse as infinite, undetermined, and plenitudinous act.
138 139 140

Trans. (Aquinas 2022). Trans. (Aquinas 1955). Cf. In Sent. I d. 19, q. 2, a. 2.
141
For the importance of this theme across Aquinas’ philosophy and theology, see Wippel (2000).
142
God and Being 39
The Logic of BI
As with the BB tradition, we can identify some core convictions and arguments
that tend to underlie BI positions in our period.
Beyond Knowledge and Language

An apophaticism comparable to that of the BB tradition is present through the
BI tradition.143 While there are different emphases and different degrees of
apophatic rigor across individual thinkers, this theme is a striking commonality
across the two traditions. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, argues that ‘the Really
Real . . . is inaccessible to our understanding’ (Life of Moses, IV.2.235).
Augustine sets down the rule that ‘if you can comprehend it, it is not God’
(Sermo 117.5), and Maimonides argues that ‘none but He Himself can appre-
hend what He is’ for ‘He is hidden from us . . . just as the sun is hidden to eyes
that are too weak to apprehend it’ (Guide I.59). The identification of God with
being is plainly not inimical to the apophatic impulse. One common BI variation
on this theme is to emphasise that God, as esse, is intelligible to himself and
knows himself, even while remaining beyond the comprehension of creatures.
Thus, according to Aquinas: ‘God, whose being is infinite . . . is infinitely
knowable. Now no created intellect can know God infinitely’ (ST I.12.7 s.c.).
The Parmenidean being–thinking link therefore tends to impinge on the BI
tradition in a different way – divine being is now thinkable but not by creaturely
thinkers – though with the same outcome as in the BB tradition: God exceeds
our minds and words.
Not a Being among Beings
Like the BB tradition, BI thinkers are committed to the view that God is not an
existing thing in the set of existing things. We noted this in detail in our
consideration of Aquinas, and the point is often emphasised by Thomists
today. For instance, Ralph McInerny: ‘God is not a being among beings,
a kind of being, a thing for whom to exist is measured by a determinate form
different from other determinate forms’.144 Other BI thinkers express compar-
able views. Albert, for instance, argues that ‘God is not categorized with other
things that exist [existentibus], as if he formed a class with them’ (In Myst. theo.
821A).145 Others state the same idea but reverse the comparison: God is the one
true being, and creatures are outsiders to the realm of (divine) being. For
143
See, for example, Mortley (1986), Carabine (1992a), and Rocca (2004).
144
See McInerny (2012, 253). See also, for example, Davies (1996) and Perl (2014, 158–61). For
a defense of ‘a being’ language about God from a Thomistic point of view, see Stump (2018).
145
Trans. (Albert the Great 1988).
Augustine, God’s ‘very nature is to be [est]’, while creatures are ‘as though they
had no being . . . compared with him they do not exist’ (En. Ps. 134.4). Anselm
argues that only God ‘exist[s] in an unqualified sense and perfectly and abso-
lutely, whereas all other things nearly do not exist at all, and barely do exist’
(Mono. 28).146 For Philo, creatures ‘exist in semblance only’ (Quod deterius
160). Palamas puts it both ways in a single sentence: God ‘is not a being [on
estin], if others are beings; and if he is a being [on], the others are not beings’
(Capita 78). These two rhetorical routes arrive at the same philosophical point:
God and beings do not lie on a common ontological plane.
On this point, there is a deep affinity between Platonist and Abrahamic-BI
conceptions of the first principle’s transcendence. This affinity gives the lie to
the perhaps tempting thought that BB is a simply a ‘more transcendent’ position
than BI: the traditions emphatically agree that the Good or God cannot be ‘in the
box’ of being.
The major exception to this rule in our period is, curiously enough, Aristotle –
the thinker at the head of the whole BI tradition. While Aristotle’s First Mover is
the cause of motion, it is apparently not the cause of existence and, therefore,
seems not to be ontologically transcendent in the way that Platonists and
Abrahamic theologians require. Most pagan and Abrahamic thinkers in the BI
tradition read (or misread) Aristotle as an ally on this issue,147 and there is only
occasional and usually oblique recognition of the problem, such as Avicenna’s
criticisms of those who seek ‘only the principle of motion’ instead of ‘the
principle and giver of existence’ (Meta. VI.1).148 From our vantage today,
though, Aristotle’s divergent view seems clear enough. As Richard Taylor
observes: ‘Aristotle seems not to have given serious consideration to being
outside of or beyond what Aquinas would call ens commune or esse commune’
(1998, 219). Aristotle’s God seems to be an ousia among ousiai, the highest and
first being among beings (proton ton onton – Metaphysics 1073a) but not the
cause of beings in the Platonist sense149 or Creator of creatures in the
146
Trans. (Anselm 2007).
147
For example, Aquinas rejects Platonist separate ideas but endorses a first principle, understood
in transcendent Platonist fashion as ‘essentially being and essentially good, which we call
God . . . and Aristotle agrees with this’ (ST I.6.4 resp.). For the reception of Aristotle’s first
mover in Latin and Arabic traditions, see Alwishah and Hayes (2015) and Galluzzo and
Amerini (2013).
148
Before Avicenna, Proclus objected that Aristotle’s prime mover fails to supply the ‘power of
existence’ that the cosmos clearly possesses (Proclus, In Tim. II.268, trans. (2008)). On the other
hand, Ammonius (175–242) and a tradition after him reads Aristotle’s prime mover as causing
motion and being, and a fascinating history of contested interpretation follows in his wake,
especially in the Arabic tradition through to Maimonides and Averroes – see Twetten (2015).
149
Cf. Eric Perl (2014, 156–7): ‘Aquinas, like Plotinus, is pointing beyond Aristotle’s question,
“What is being?” (Meta. Ζ.1) to which essence, intelligible in virtue of form or whatness,
God and Being 41
Abrahamic sense.150 It is reasonable, then, to view Aristotle as an ‘in the box’

thinker151 (we would meet many more if we carried our inquiry into modernity).
If, like BB thinkers, the BI tradition denies that God can be ‘in the box’ of
beings, how should we map the BI position onto our box of being? This question
presses the thought experiment to the limits of its usefulness. Probably the least
false answer is to say that, for the BI tradition, God is the box, so long as the
absolute ontological difference between uncreated ‘box’ and created ‘contents’
is somehow still retained. The meaning of ‘being’ attributed to the box in this
case will likely differ from the meaning that is usually in play in the BB
tradition, as we will see in the following.
God as Intellect, Agent, Creator, and Person
In the Neoplatonist tradition, the first principle is usually understood as ‘above

intellect’. For Plotinus, the One is above intellect because intellection, like
being, entails plurality: even if Intellect thinks self-reflexively, so that it is
‘both thinking and object of thinking’, still it ‘will be double, and not simple,
nor will it be the One’ and thus ‘the One is primary, while Intellect, Forms and
Being are not primary’ (Enn. VI.9.2). Excepting Porphyry, the Neoplatonists
follow Plotinus on this point, typically positioning Nous as a second hypostasis
under the One.
provides a sufficient answer, to the further question, “Why are there beings, rather than
nothing?”’.
150
Cf. Avicenna (Meta. VIII.3.6): ‘the meaning of a thing’s being created . . . [is] attaining
existence from another’.

151
In a careful critique of my view here, an anonymous referee argues that, while Aristotle does not
endorse a BB position in the sense of Plotinus or even Aquinas, it is false that the First Mover is
a being-among-beings, and, therefore, it is wrong to say that Aristotle is an ‘in the box’ thinker.
For Aristotle, being is said in many ways, and the special sense of being (ousia) attributed to the
First Mover distinguishes it from all other beings – as my referee observes, ‘only the Unmoved
Mover is being itself in the full, focal, and primary sense’. This sets the First Mover apart as
transcendent in a stronger sense than merely a ‘higher being among beings’: ‘hence the
Unmoved Mover as being itself, and other things as beings in a lesser, derivative imitative
sense, cannot be put together in the same box’. I do not dispute the claim that Aristotle’s God is
unique and even ontologically unique. The First Mover is not just another substance among
substances; it is the unique and primary ousia. Nevertheless, if we take the contents-of-the-box
to refer to Aquinas’ esse commune (in the spirit of Richard Taylor’s remark), then I think my
judgement holds. The Aristotelian First Mover is surely different from other substances, but is it
sufficiently different to transcend the community of substances to the satisfaction of Abrahamic
BI (let alone BB) thinkers? In my view, the First Mover remains ‘in the box’ because it fails to
stand outside the community of ousia as its cause, in the sense of ‘cause of being’ that the
Platonists and Abrahamic traditions seek with their One and Creator. Of course, being is said in
many ways, and the box metaphor can be worked in many ways, and it may be an injustice to
Aristotle to measure him by Platonist/Thomistic lights like this. Nonetheless, I think this is the
most illuminating way to consider Aristotle’s First Mover in relation to the BI tradition that
follows him. I remain grateful to my referee for their careful attention on this point.
BI thinkers, on the other hand, tend to identify the first principle with
intellectuality. Several sources inform this tendency. One is Aristotle. The
Aristotelian First Mover is characterised by self-reflexive thought – ‘its thinking
is a thinking on thinking’ – and this is its actuality (Meta. 1075a, 1072a).
Another is the Platonist construal of forms as ideas located in, or identical
with, God’s mind (Dillon 2019). This seems to begin in the Old Academy with
Xenocrates and continues through Middle Platonist thinkers including Philo and
Alcinous. If some Middle Platonists are right to interpret the ‘likely story’ of the
Timaeus as a myth, so that the demiurge consulting the forms is a metaphor for the
divine mind reflecting on its own ideas, then this framework may already be
present in Plato as well (Gerson 2006; Perl 1998). This integration of Platonist
forms with an intellectual first principle is appropriated in the theologies of many
later Abrahamic thinkers, including leading patristic and medieval figures –
Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. (McIntosh 2021). In addition to these
Aristotelian and Platonist influences, Abrahamic thinkers of course also look to
biblical descriptions of God as an intellectual agent (Wisdom, Word, etc.).
Given the traditional Parmenidean being–thinking link, this BI preference for an
intellectual first principle makes sense: God is esse, so God is also intellegere.
Indeed, we might think of a BI position, which seems to accommodate God’s
intellectuality more easily than the ‘beyond intellect’ alternative of the BB trad-
ition, as the more natural fit for Abrahamic monotheism.152 We might even extend
the point to include other personal characteristics in addition to intellectuality, such
as agency, will, love, and creativity (in the sense of ‘creator’). One might then
argue that, because the first principle of monotheism cannot be a mere principle but
must be a person possessing personal characteristics like these, it follows that

a coherent account of this is only possible in a BI framework, not a BB one.153
While there may be some explanatory value in this observation – after all,
most Abrahamic thinkers do hold a BI view that includes divine intellect –
I think the exceptions are too many to make it a reliable rule. For instance, some
BI sources construe intellect as a secondary or created principle beneath the
divine pure being – for example, al-Kindi, Arabic De causis, Ibn Gabirol, and
152
Cf. Aquinas (In De causis prop. 13): ‘But because, according to the opinion of Aristotle (which
in this agrees more [than Proclus] with Catholic doctrine), we do not maintain that there are
many forms above intellects but only one, which is the first cause, we must say that, just as the
first cause is being itself, so is it life itself and first intellect itself’.
153
Cf. Rudi te Velde (2020, 130–1):
‘[for Aquinas] “Being” must be the primary name of the divine cause. The reason of
this is that the supreme Good of Plato must be more than an ideal principle; it must be
an Aristotelian agens, a real principle with an effective power . . . only as identical with
being can the absolute good be identified with God in the sense of an effective principle
which grants being to creatures’.
God and Being 43
the Anonymous Commentator. On the other hand, BB sources often attribute

personal characteristics to their first principle. Plotinus has a detailed account of
the One’s will, desire, and love (Enn. VI.8); all Neoplatonists use theos talk for
the One; BB Christians such as Dionysius, John Damascene, and Eriugena
speak freely of God’s intellect and wisdom in a ‘beyond being’ context, not
least with respect to the Trinitarian Word. On the related issue of first principle
as Creator, the familiar contrast of Greek/Platonist emanation versus Abrahamic
creation is not as straightforward in the ancient and medieval period as is often
assumed (Taylor 2012). Also, we should not press the claim about Abrahamic
divine personality too far – few Abrahamic thinkers in our period would be
attracted to what is sometimes today called ‘theistic personalism’, in contrast to
‘classical theism’ (Davies and Ruse 2021).
Revising the Meaning of ‘Being’
I have suggested that BB and BI agree the first principle is not ‘a being’ among
beings and that it therefore cannot be located ‘in the box’ of being. If the
traditions agree on this core issue, then why do we still confront the contradict-
ory language of ‘beyond being’ versus ‘being itself’? One possible answer to
this question is that BI thinkers have revised the meaning of ‘being’ so that it can
accommodate the characteristics that the BB tradition attaches to the Good.
One important BI revision is the idea of infinite being (Sweeney 1992; Undusk
2009, 2012). This contrasts with the typical Greek view of being as finite, which
we noted in our BB discussion. We have seen some likely beginnings of this idea in
the Anonymous Commentator’s undetermined einai and Victorinus’ esse infinitum
and interminatum (Ad. Arium IV.19). Despite the influence of Victorinus,

Augustine only rarely deploys the idea explicitly – for example, God is ‘a certain
substance [substantiam] that is living, eternal, omnipotent, infinite [infinitam]’ (In
Jo. Ev. I.1.8).154 In the Greek East, we earlier noted Gregory of Nyssa’s novel
account of infinite being. Other leading Greek and Latin Christian sources, such as
Hilary of Poitiers (310–367), Dionysius, Eriugena, Peter Lombard (1096–1160),
and Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141), speak of infinity of the divine nature, power,
or eternity but do not affirm it specifically of divine being. After 1250, versions of
infinite being became commonplace in the Latin West – for example, Albert,
Henry of Ghent (1217–1293), Aquinas, Bonaventure, and many more – with
Richard Fishacre (1200–1248) possibly serving as the primary innovating figure
(Sweeney 1992, 319–470). These sophisticated scholastic renditions of infinite
being may have been encouraged by a new integration of Aristotelian theories of
matter and potency in accounting for how beings are ‘determined’, in addition to
154
Trans. (Rettig 1988).
the inherited Platonist notion that form is the ‘determining’ principle. In this
context, God’s being is infinite in the sense that it is not determined or restricted
in any way by potency. Whatever the reasons for its emergence, the notion of
infinite being offers BI thinkers a way of attributing einai or esse to the first
principle while still accommodating the BB demand for transcendence beyond
(finite) beings.
Another BI revision to the meaning of ‘being’ develops with the doctrine of
transcendentals in the medieval Latin tradition (Aertsen 2012). As being is
configured to be identical with Good, so it is configured to be identical also with
unity, truth, beauty, thing (res), and something (aliquid) – the details vary in
different thinkers – and this supports the attribution of being to God, who
medieval thinkers agree possesses all perfections.
Such revisions mean that, more often than not, when BI thinkers attribute
‘being’ to the first principle, they attribute something other than the ‘being’
which BB thinkers deny of it.155
From Above versus from Below
There is a basic conceptual difficulty in thinking about transcendence, which

has been present under the surface in much of the material we have considered
in this study. How can a first principle be (a) absolutely transcendent above all
beings, yet also (b) cause of those beings and source of their characteristics and
excellences? This looks like a dilemma. If the First has a causal relationship to
the plurality of beings and their characteristics, then it seems impossible for it to
be strictly simple, transcendent, and independent of them. As many interpreters
have noticed, this transcendence versus causality problem is intrinsic to

Platonist thinking about the first principle (Greig 2020, 25; Riel 2016, 76).
(Indeed, it seems to be reflected in most or all of the world’s philosophical/
religious traditions that contend with transcendence.)156
155
Cf. Norris Clarke (1959, 80): ‘the apparently unbridgeable gap between Plotinian infinite
nonbeing and Christian infinite being is largely an artificial one, created by playing on the
two terms as though they meant the same in both climates of thought . . . the “nonbeing” of
[Plotinus’s] One . . . [signifies] the most supremely real and positively perfect of all realities,
precisely because it is above all particular limited beings as their ultimate source’.
156
Ahbel-Rappe (Damascius 2009, 161) writes:
‘one of Neoplatonism’s central dilemmas [is] caused by the tensions between a One
that is utterly transcendent vs. the One conceived as first principle, source of all
subsequent stages of reality. The significance of this discussion cannot be underesti-
mated, as the various ways of conceiving the first principle, in terms of an ultimately
negative theology or in terms of an attributive (or kataphatic) theology, have informed
theological inquiry in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions, largely echoing
Neoplatonist formulations . . . it is at the heart of theological inquiries almost
universally’.
God and Being 45
The figures we have considered are drawn to both horns of the dilemma.
Maximus speaks for many in both BB and BI traditions when he notes the
appeal of being talk for ‘affirming the being of God as cause of beings’ and the
equal appeal of non-being talk for ‘completely denying in him the being which
all beings have, based on his preeminence as cause’ (Mystagogia 664AC). The
BI tradition, encouraged in some cases by Abrahamic commitments, tends to
emphasise the causality of the First, by emphasising that ipsum esse pre-
contains all perfections and typically recognising a legitimate analogical ascrip-
tion of perfections to the first cause and its effects. The BB tradition tends to
emphasise the transcendence of the First, deploying the epekeina to underscore
the absolute distinction between finite being and the First.157 But I think that we
can see these BB and BI emphases as two perspectives on the same difficulty,
one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’.158 Seen this way, the perspectives can
plausibly be reconciled, a possibility we will explore further in the next section.
3 Reconciling the Traditions?

Having completed our historical sketches of the BB and BI traditions, I now
want to consider whether these traditions are in fact as opposed as they appear.
To say that the first principle is ‘beyond being’ seems incompatible with, and
maybe even a precise antithesis of, the claim that the first principle is ‘being
itself’. Is this true?
Irreconcilable Traditions
In recent times, a set of influential Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
scholars have argued that it is indeed true. On the Eastern side, Christos
Yannaras sees ‘an insurmountable contrast on the level of ontology as well as
epistemology’ between the Western ‘apophaticism of divine being’ and the
‘Christian thought of the Greek East’ (2005, 23–30). ‘The absolutizing of the
existential fact’ in Western theological understandings of God as pure act
‘continues to limit the ontological problem to the field of abstract definitions’
and indeed contributes to a ‘difference between Byzantium and the West
[which] is a difference between two comprehensive epistemological-ethical
views of the world, humanity and God’ (2007, 22, 220). Yannaras’ argument
develops Vladimir Lossky’s celebration of the Eastern BB way of thinking in
opposition to Western scholastic approaches (1957).
157
Still, even Plotinus (Enn. V.3.15), the arch-BB thinker, recognises the causal requirement and
describes the One as ‘the productive power of all things [dunamis pantos]’.
158
Wayne Hankey (1980, 145): ‘both sides [i.e. BB and BI Platonists] are endeavouring to think
how the first can both be transcendent and yet all things be in and derive from it as their source–
though perhaps they are looking at this problem from its opposite ends’.
Some twentieth-century Thomists, pre-eminently Étienne Gilson, see

a similar contradiction between the BB and BI traditions but defend the
other side of the divide. ‘No Christian philosophy can posit anything above
Being’, Gilson argues (1952, 30), and he condemns Victorinus, Dionysius,
Eriugena, and Eckhart for doing so (1952, 1–40; 2002, 137–74). To affirm a
‘beyond being’ is ‘absolutely inconsistent with the mental universe of
Christian thinkers . . . one cannot think, at one and the same time, as
a Neoplatonist and as a Christian’ (1952, 31). For Gilson, the BI position is
a straightforward antithesis of the BB approach: in Aquinas’ theory of esse,
‘the entire doctrine of [Pseudo-Dionysius] … is here inverted’ (1994, 140).
Such overtly antagonistic presentations of BB versus BI are surprisingly rare
in the historical sources, perhaps due to a common (though not universal)
conviction in our period that the great authorities of the past agree, if only
their texts are rightly interpreted and harmonised (Adamson 2022; Karamanolis
2006). One illuminating instance of explicit antagonism, however, is Proclus’
critique of those who say that the Good has a peculiar sort of existence above
being (In Rem XI.282).159 ‘What prevents the Good, they say, from both being
existent [ousia] and superessential [huperousia]?’160 Proclus replies that it is
‘not true that the Good has existence in a different sense of existence [ousia]’,
and explains:
This is because there is only one signification of being belonging to all of the
intelligibles, which we say both ‘is’ [einai] and ‘genuinely is’ [ontos einai].
But since the Good is established above these things, what kind of existence
[ousia] is left for it, in accordance with which it is an existence [ousia] and not
solely superessential [huperousion]? All existence [ousia] is of necessity

being [on], but Socrates said that the Good was not beyond existence [ousias]
alone but also beyond being [einai]. Therefore one ought not to say that the
Good exists [einai], since it is beyond existing [epekeina tou einai estin]. (In
Rem XI.282)
Proclus argues here that there is no linguistic or metaphysical likeness between

the ontological standing of beings and the standing of the One. He puts his finger
on the decisive issue here, I think – what kind of being is left for the first
principle, if it is beyond all beings? If the answer to this question is, as Proclus
suggests, ‘none’, then BB and BI do indeed appear to be fundamentally opposed
ways of thinking.
159
Trans. (Proclus 2018).
160
It is not clear who Proclus has in view here – it may be Neoplatonists such as Porphyry or
Amelius or maybe earlier Middle Platonists.
God and Being 47
Reconcilable Traditions
If, on the other hand, the Anonymous Commentator could be right that ‘being is
double’ in some sense, then there may be another kind of being available for the
First, and it may be possible to harmonise BB and BI positions. To explore this
possibility, let us consider a passage from Aquinas’ commentary on
Proposition 6 of the Liber de causis. This text offers, I think, a model instance
of reconciling the core claims of the BB and BI traditions. The historical–textual
background of Aquinas’ De causis commentary makes it especially fitting for
this task of cross-tradition synthesis. Aquinas’ commentary (1272 Paris)
expounds a Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona (twelfth-century Toledo)
of an Arabic adaptation, likely penned by a Syriac Christian in the circle of
Muslim philosopher al-Kindi (ninth-century Bagdhad) of metaphysical writings
by Proclus the pagan Neoplatonist (fifth-century Egypt-Greece), which are
inspired by Greek philosophy’s great master, Plato (fifth-century BCE
Athens). This long, rich inheritance in Aquinas’ De causis commentary well
reflects the intellectual paths that we have been tracing through this study, which
run through a vast breadth of Western histories, languages, and geographies.
In our passage, Aquinas addresses the central question of our study: in what
sense is the first principle beyond being, or being itself? He begins by citing the
Platonist BB position:
[T]he first cause is above being [supra ens] . . . According to the Platonists,
however, the first cause is above being [supra ens] inasmuch as the essence of
goodness and unity, which is the first cause, also surpasses [excedit] separated
being itself [ipsum ens], as was said above. But, according to the truth of the
matter, the first cause is above being [supra ens] inasmuch as it is itself infinite ‘to
be’ [ipsum esse infinitum]. ‘Being’, [ens] however, is called that which finitely
participates ‘to be’, [esse] and it is this which is proportioned to our intellect,
whose object is some ‘that which is’ [quod quid est], as it is said in Book 3 of On
the Soul. Hence our intellect can grasp only that which has a quiddity participating
‘to be’ [esse]. But the quiddity of God is ‘to be’ itself [ipsum esse]. Thus it is above
the intellect . . . and it is evident that the first cause transcends description. (In De
causis prop. 6)
Aquinas here accepts the core BB claim that the first principle is above being
(supra ens) and agrees that it is rightly characterised as goodness and unity. He
even cites the Platonist view that the Good or One ‘surpasses’ – no doubt in the
sense of Platonic epekeina – not just beings but separated being itself (ipsum
esse), and embraces the position for his own, even if he explicates it in
a particular way in the next sentence. This sympathetic treatment of BB
transcendence is in keeping with Aquinas’ view, as discussed earlier, that God
is located outside esse commune and outside the order of beings. It is in keeping
also with his view articulated elsewhere that, despite his criticisms of the
Platonici on issues such as separated ideas, ‘as regards what [the Platonists]
said about the first principle of things, their opinion is most true and harmonizes
with the Christian faith’ (In Div. Nom. proem 2).161 Thus, Aquinas, like many
before him,162 sees a natural fit between Platonist talk about a Good beyond
being and Abrahamic talk – including BI talk – about God.
In addition to recognising an intellectual comrade in Plato, Aquinas also indicates
in this passage how BI and BB frameworks can be integrated. He distinguishes
between two senses of being: first, God’s infinite esse which is identical with his
quiddity, and second, the finite ens of creatures, which exists only by participating in
esse. Aquinas explains that while our minds can grasp the quiddities of finite entia,
the divine esse is its own quiddity, and so it transcends our capacities of thought and
language. These two modes of esse are related metaphysically by participation and
linguistically/epistemologically (though Aquinas does not spell this out here)
through analogy. With this distinction in hand, Aquinas can argue that the BB
position (supra ens) is secured precisely through the first principle’s peculiar
ontological standing: God is beyond ens inasmuch as he is ipsum esse infinitum.
God is located beyond being by his infinity of being. This represents, I think,
a plausible way of reconciling the two traditions we have outlined in this study.163
This passage also stands as a Thomistic reply to Proclus’ objection to BI
positions. Proclus asks: ‘since the Good is established above these things, what
kind of existence is left for it?’ For Aquinas, the other ‘kind of existence’
available for the Good is esse divinum. ‘God’s being [esse divinum], which is
his essence, is not common being [esse commune], but being [esse] distinct from
all other being, so that by his very being [esse], God is distinct from every other
being’ (De pot. 7.2 ad 4).
Aquinas’ exposition of the Liber de causis invites us to say – contra Gilson,
Yannaras, and company – that we can in fact reconcile BB and BI.164 This
compatibilist view is shared by a good number of contemporary interpreters of
the BB and BI traditions. William Franke, for instance, judges that the apparent
BB–BI contradiction is in reality ‘a matter of sensibility and outlook and ultimately
161
Cf. ST I.6.4 resp. For this reason, he also endorses Dionysian descriptions of God as super-good
(superbonum) and super-substance (supersubstantiam) (In Div. nom. proem).
162
For example, Albert praises ‘the wisdom of Plato’ regarding the first principle (Summa de
mirabili scientia dei 2, q. 3, m. 3, a. 2) (Vargas 2013), and Augustine (Civ. dei 8.11) sees his own
BI view as previously articulated ‘with the greatest possible care by Plato’.
163
Another passage that might be used for this purpose is Maximus’ discussion of God’s huparxin
beyond ousia at Mystagogia 664 AC.
164
Cf. Edward Booth (1983, 207n5): ‘[Gilson has a] too limited conception of “Thomas, the
Aristotelian,” to whom Platonism is the evident enemy. But such a misunderstanding is an
unconscious witness to Thomas’ complete success in so combining Aristotelian with Platonist,
Cryptoproclean ideas that neither is disturbed’.
God and Being 49
of modes of relationship’ (2007, 15). John Rist argues that Augustine’s BI position
‘clarifies and advances the intent while often discarding the vocabulary of
Neoplatonism’ (2007, 86). Eric Perl suggests that the ‘all too common’ opposition
of Aquinas’ God with Plotinus’ One is based on ‘nothing more than a difference of
terminology, and in large part an accident of translation’ (2011a, 185). Reflecting on
the Jewish tradition, Sarah Pessin argues that Gabirol’s God of pure being can be
‘consistently and meaningfully be described in Plotinus’ own terms as a One
“above being”’ (2003, 100). In a passage worth quoting at length, David Bentley
Hart argues that opposing ‘beyond being’ and ‘being itself’ is ‘simply a false
opposition, inasmuch as the word “being” is certainly not univocal between the two
usages’:
When the Greek fathers spoke of God as Being – as, that is, to ontos on (etc.) – or
when Latin theologians, patristic or mediaeval, spoke of God as ens, actus
essendi subsistens, or esse (etc.), they were speaking of God as the transcendent
source and end of all things, whose being is not merely the opposite of nonbeing,
and in whom there is no unrealised potential, deficiency, or change. But it is
precisely in this sense that God is also (to use the venerable Platonic phrase)
epekeina tēs ousias: ‘superessential’, ‘supersubstantial’, ‘beyond being’. That is,
he wholly transcends ‘beings’, and discrete ‘substances’, and the ‘totality of
substances’, and the created being in which all beings share; and no concept we
possess of beings or of being makes it possible for us to comprehend him.
. . . In either case, there is no conceptum univocum entis to span the divide
between divine and created being, and thus the true distinction to be drawn is
not one between two incompatible ways of naming God, peculiar respectively
to West and East, but between two forms of the same name, corresponding to
two distinct moments within what I would be content to call the ‘analogy of
being’ (2008, 196–8).
This proposed BB–BI compatibility encourages us to see the BB and BI

traditions as pursuing a common intellectual project of inquiry into transcend-
ence. The thinkers we have considered use a wide set of vocabularies to indicate
a first principle that is epekeina, huper, super, ultra, and beyond beings. The
decision whether to subsequently attribute a special sense of ‘being’ to the first
principle in BI fashion is, in a sense, internal to this primary project of
distinguishing the origin of being from the beings to which it gives existence –
that is, of clarifying why the origin of being cannot be ‘in the box’. Seen this
way, the differing languages of BB and BI are ‘in house’ differences – they
represent alternative but compatible ways of articulating transcendence.165 BB
and BI are therefore, I suggest, different ways of saying the same thing.
165
However, might we not object, as a perceptive anonymous referee of this manuscript suggests,
that there are major BI thinkers, especially Augustine, who ultimately do not share the ‘not in
the box’ conviction that is essential to BB? Answering this satisfactorily would require a
4 God and Being Today

To conclude this Element, I will suggest a couple of ways that our findings can
contribute to current discussions in philosophy of religion.
First, in analytic philosophy of religion, some recent treatments of apophatic
theological language engage explicitly with the BB and BI traditions. In par-
ticular, Michael Rea develops a view that welcomes an apophatic and analogical
dimension in perfection attributions such as goodness, love, and justice, but not
being (2018, 42–62; 2020). Despite sympathies with the BB and BI traditions,
he argues that they both falter because a theologically satisfactory account of
divine existence requires that ‘being’ is attributed to God not metaphorically or
even analogically but literally and univocally. Existence talk must be literal/
univocal because ‘unlike other predicates (like “is good” or “is loving”) that are
ripe for apophatic treatment, there is no theological reason for thinking that
existence-words express merely “creaturely” modes of being’ (2020, 135).
Indeed, he argues that those who distinguish between divine and creaturely
modes of being are not rightly called ‘theists’ because they fail to attribute
existence in the usual sense to God. Rea’s judgement likely rules out every
historical figure we have considered in this study. (If Avicenna, Maimonides,
and Aquinas cannot manage to be theists, what hope for the rest of us!)
Our study’s findings can intervene here. The shared claim of the BB and BI
traditions is that, if God is truly to be the cause of creatures, he simply cannot be
case-by-case analysis at a level of detail not possible here. But let us glance at Augustine as an
exemplary instance. My referee argues that God for Augustine is pure intelligible being,
whereas, for Plotinus and Aquinas, God transcends intelligible being as its principle, and so
Augustine falls short of BB transcendence. (Cf. Eric Perl (2011b, 770): ‘The difference between
Dionysius’ and Augustine’s Christian versions of Platonism is instructive . . . Augustine’s God
is fundamentally pure intellect, pure form, pure being, and the Platonic idea of the first principle
as beyond all these is to a large extent lost’.) I agree that reconciling BI to BB is a tougher task in
Augustine than in Aquinas, since Aquinas’ distinction of creaturely and divine esse, with the
latter explicitly lying supra ens, is not anticipated straightforwardly in his predecessor (though
the possibility noted earlier of Victorinus’ act-einai-esse transmitting to Augustine would make
this more likely). Nevertheless, I think there is an alternative framework in Augustine for
making the same point, namely the contrast of God’s perfect existence with creatures’ ‘non-
existence’ – a created thing ‘slips away, flows off, and holds onto nothing actual, that is, to speak
Latin, it does not exist [non esse]’ (Epist. 2, trans. (Augustine 2001)). This view aligns with Rist
(2007). We might worry that Augustine has failed to think past a simple Platonist sensible/
intelligible distinction here; but I think this underappreciates the intervention of his Creator/
creature commitments, which cut across the inherited Greek distinction. This is why Marion can
speak of an Augustinian ‘equivocity of being’, a phrase that I noted earlier with some reserva-
tions but which makes the relevant point here: Augustine can be read as affirming the BB
principle from within a different conceptual framework and this is Augustine’s version of the BI
commitment to ‘not a being among beings’, discussed in the ‘Logic of BI’ section earlier. In this
vein, the essays by Hart, Marion, and Bradshaw in Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou (2008) can
be read together as an illuminating debate about how to position Augustine with respect to BB
and BI thinking.
God and Being 51
another being among these beings. This conviction requires that we distinguish
a creaturely mode of existence from God’s mode of existence and thus develop
some sort of ‘double being’ structure (to use the Anonymous Commentator’s
phrase). In the BB and BI traditions, versions of this structure are articulated
using the plethora of terminologies for created beings we have encountered in
this study: contingent being, finite being, common being, participated being,
etc. This basic logic of classical theism can, I think, supply Rea with his missing
‘theological reason’ for distinguishing divine and creaturely ontology. Perhaps,
it could also motivate a conscientious analytic reception of historic BB and/or
BI theories,166 in the way that a recent analytic work has examined, for example,
creedal Christological claims (Pawl 2016).
Turning to Continental philosophy of religion, the findings of study are
relevant to debates about Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. Ontotheology
refers to conceptual systems that coordinate God and beings as mutually explana-
tory entities. Or, as my preferred working definition goes: ‘ontotheology, that is,
God being part and parcel of the general being of the world’.167 Heidegger
worries that ontotheology occludes philosophical inquiry by giving pat answers
to profound questions about Being and that it produces a philosopher’s God that is
useless for true religion: ‘man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play
music and dance before this god’ (Heidegger 1969, 72).168
More or less endorsing Heidegger’s critique, a set of recent Continental
philosophers have responded by seeking a non-ontotheological approach to
theology and religion (Gschwandtner 2013). Working in the wake of Levinas’
retrieval of Plato for his ‘otherwise than being’ (Levinas 1991) and energised by
Derrida’s engagement with negative theology (Derrida 1992), some of these

scholars retrieve BB historical figures for this purpose, most often Pseudo-
Dionysius (Marion 1995; Yannaras 2005) but also Eriugena (Moran 2004, 99–
102), Eckhart (Moore 2018; Rubenstein 2003), and others. Crudely put, the
appeal of the BB tradition here is that, if God is not captured by being, then he is
not captured by ontotheology. Thus, with a BB God, religion and theology can
renew itself for a post-Heideggerian future.
166
Cf. Sarah Coakley’s (2013, 6) hope, expressed in the early days of analytic theology, that going
forward ‘the analytic wing is willing to admit the sui generis ontological status of the divine’.
Work in this direction includes Jacobs (2015).
167
Marion (2005, 146). Heidegger’s own definition is articulated in Heidegger (1969).
168
Despite his critique of ontotheology, Heidegger (1998, 181) remains curiously blind to the
Platonist thought of a BB principle exceeding creaturely ontology. He sees Plato as a founder of
ontotheology and Plato’s Good as merely ‘the being-est of beings’, and he pays hardly any
attention to the Neoplatonists. Yet, equally curiously, at points, Heidegger (2002) seems to
positively echo BB thinking, as in his notion of Ereignis that ‘gives’ being. I am grateful to an
anonymous referee and to my doctoral student, Emile Alexandrov, for suggestions on this point.
Our major proposal in this study, namely that the BB and BI traditions are
complementary, can widen this Continental project of ‘overcoming’ ontotheol-
ogy. If the step beyond being can indeed escape ontotheology, then perhaps
thinkers in the BI tradition, at least as we have traced it up to Aquinas, can do the
same, with the step supra ens made now by way of ipsum esse and with the BI
analogia doing the same work as the BB epekeina. Jean-Luc Marion’s later
work on Aquinas, Anselm, and Augustine, and Emmanuel Falque’s work on
Bonaventure are two exemplars here (Falque 2018; Marion 1992, 2003, 2012).
Such retrievals of BI thinkers can also correspond with the ‘return of metaphys-
ics’ in recent post-postmodern Continental philosophy (Sparrow 2014). If
a reconsideration of the BI tradition in this way is plausible, then Heidegger’s
historical diagnosis of ontotheology will need a reconsideration as well
(Hankey 2004). Heidegger locates the beginning of ontotheology at the
Presocratic–Socratic transition, but it may be the case that ontotheology in
a pernicious sense properly begins much later, perhaps with Scotus, Henry of
Ghent (1293–1217), or Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), as a number of intellec-
tual historians have proposed (Boulnois 2016; Miner 2001).169
Conclusion
In the remark cited as an epigraph to this Element, Origen laments that ‘there is
much to say which is hard to perceive about being’ and points to the particular
difficulty of working out ‘whether God transcends being . . . or whether He is
Himself being’ (Contra Celsum VI.64). Origen is not alone in perceiving the
difficulty of this task. Aristotle says that ‘the question which is hardest of all and
most perplexing’ is ‘whether unity and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato
said, are not attributes of something else but are the substance of existing things’
(Meta. 996a). Indeed, this is ‘the hardest inquiry of all, and the one most
necessary for knowledge of the truth’ (Meta. 1001a). Aristotle and Origen ask
versions of the same hard question – is there a single principle of existence, and
how is it related to the being of existing things? This study has not attempted to
answer this hardest of questions directly, only to sketch the two major answers
given to it in the premodern Western traditions. If our study does provide some
reply to Origen’s question – is God beyond being or being itself? – then it is this:
the answer could be ‘both’.
169
Daniel Horan defends Scotus against these charges in Horan (2014). Horan is responding to the
work of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, which brought the Scotus intellectual history
debates to prominence in theology – see, for example, Milbank (2018) and Pickstock (2005).
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many colleagues and friends for conversations and advice in
writing this study. For assistance great and small, I thank Angus Brook, David
Bronstein, Renee Köhler-Ryan, Joseph Wood, Andrew Davison, Gaven Kerr,
and Lloyd Gerson. For assistance on Greek and Coptic language matters, I thank
Lucy Smith and Sam Kaldas. I am grateful to series editors Chad Meister and
Paul Moser for their guidance and patience, and I am obliged to two anonymous
reviewers of the manuscript, whose critical comments prompted some import-
ant revisions and additions. I thank Chris Wilcox for her generous Blue
Mountains hospitality while I worked on Section 2. I am most grateful to my
wife, Kate, and our little ones, Halle and Hugh, who were each accommodating
in their own ways as I worked on this manuscript. The Good is the light of being,
Plato says – these three are the lights of my life.
For Hugh. Birth is the gift of being, and what a gift yours was.
Religion and Monotheism
Paul K. Moser
Loyola University Chicago
Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of
Paul’s Gospel of Divine Self-Sacrifice; The Divine Goodness of Jesus; Divine Guidance;
Understanding Religious Experience; The God Relationship; The Elusive God (winner of
national book award from the Jesuit Honor Society); The Evidence for God; The Severity of
God; Knowledge and Evidence (all Cambridge University Press); and Philosophy after
Objectivity (Oxford University Press); co-author of Theory of Knowledge (Oxford University
Press); editor of Jesus and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) and The Oxford
Handbook of Epistemology (Oxford University Press); co-editor of The Wisdom of the
Christian Faith (Cambridge University Press). He is the co-editor with Chad Meister of the
book series Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society.
Chad Meister
Affiliate Scholar, Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion,
University of Notre Dame
Chad Meister is Affiliate Scholar at the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with
Religion at the University of Notre Dame. His authored and co-authored books include Evil:
A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd edition); Introducing Philosophy of
Religion (Routledge); Introducing Christian Thought (Routledge, 2nd edition); and
Contemporary Philosophical Theology (Routledge). He has edited or co-edited the
following: The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity (Oxford University Press); Debating
Christian Theism (Oxford University Press); with Paul Moser, The Cambridge Companion to
the Problem of Evil (Cambridge University Press); and with Charles Taliaferro, The History of
Evil (Routledge, in six volumes). He is the co-editor with Paul Moser of the book series
Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society.
About the Series

This Cambridge Element series publishes original concise volumes on monotheism
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Mohammad Saleh Zarepour
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Lyons

This Element examines how the Western philosophical-

God and Being

About the Series Series Editors

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026413 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover Towfiqu Photography/Getty ISSN 2631-3014 (online)

GOD AND BEING

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

ISSN 2631-3014 (online)

Elements in Religion and Monotheism

Abstract: This Element examines how the Western

Keywords: Platonism, theological ontology, being, Plato, Aquinas

© Nathan Lyons 2023

1 The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition 3

2 The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition 19

3 Reconciling the Traditions? 45

4 God and Being Today 50

introduce students to some of the metaphysical puzzles implicit in the idea of

1. The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition

2. The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition

Sections 1 and 2 will offer a loosely chronological, selective survey of BB and

This structure, which divides BB and BI into two separate ‘traditions’, is

1 The ‘Beyond Being’ Tradition

And Glaucon comically said: By Apollo, what a daemonic superiority!

account or any knowledge or perception or opinion of it. (141e-142a)9

Again, many interpretations of these difﬁcult passage have been proposed

Plato’s nephew and immediate successor as head of the Academy, Speusippus

Neopythagoreans, beginning in the ﬁrst-century BCE. Among these, we note

Since the Substantiality that is generated is form . . . the One is necessarily

before Being’ (De prin. II.21).

From Good to God

Theological (theos) language is present in virtually all Greek discussions of ﬁrst

The Abrahamic Traditions

language and knowledge:

[He] transcends [huper] mind and being [ousian]. He is completely unknown

[T]he unknowing of what is beyond being [huperousiotetos] is something

These BB commitments are conﬁrmed in Dionysius’ recognition of Good as the

Yet, alongside these many BB descriptions of God as an extra-ontological

John Damascene (c. 676–749), apparently departing from Dionysius, gives

boundless sea of essence [ousias apeiron], He contains all being in Himself’

that, properly speaking, God is ‘superessential’ (huperousios), an ‘essence beyond

excellence, not privation:

[S]o long as it is understood to be incomprehensible by reason of its tran-

[W]hen we predicate being of Him we do not say that He is [non dicimus

Indeed, some interpreters suggest that, on balance, Eriugena’s theological

‘can be read as an alternative to a metaphysics based on Exodus 3:14’ (Carabine

Jews and Muslims

A more sustained Islamic BB stream is the tenth–eleventh century tradition of

Beyond Knowledge and Language

Not a Being among Beings

something” . . . [but] “that which transcends Being” does not indicate

In the BB tradition, being is typically assumed to be ﬁnite, not inﬁnite.51 There

Lastly, we must comment on a strangeness in BB thinking that we ﬁrst noted in

2 The ‘Being Itself’ Tradition

actuality of the eternal prime mover’ (Meta. 1050b).54 It is ‘a mover which

Imagine someone sitting at the top of a lookout: he catches a quick glimpse of

being (Dillon 2007).

the Parmenides (Turner and Corrigan 2011a). These developments in the

The God of Exodus

The Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew as ego eimi ho on becomes a common

The Christian Tradition

Augustine emphasises immutability as the deﬁning trait of divinity. God is the

operum II.1.14).87 A BB emphasis on transcending created beings is still often